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00:00Some grannies write recipes, some write birthday cards.
00:08Nancy Crampton Brophy wrote murder novels.
00:12But when her husband was killed in broad daylight,
00:15the question became, was this fiction or something far stranger?
00:23The fire department personnel realized that there was a shooting that had occurred.
00:28A medical emergency at Oregon Culinary Institute becomes something much, much darker.
00:37Things weren't right when we responded.
00:41We expected to see a forced entry, a burglary, a robbery,
00:45and we weren't seeing any of those indicators.
00:48We were all interviewed, and the questions were a blur.
00:53Somebody that could plan something like this out is definitely an anomaly.
01:00It looks like the killer planned the perfect crime until a shocking suspect is uncovered.
01:08Nancy was a romance author and the president of my writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers.
01:14So she's the queen bee.
01:17She lost herself in her fiction.
01:20It was deliberately sensational.
01:23She seemed like a good grandma.
01:25Even did some babysitting at some point.
01:28We had a hard time wrapping our minds around her being involved in her husband's death.
01:34Is she a cold-blooded killer or just somebody's grandmother?
01:38At the time, I was a student at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
02:02That morning was a normal day.
02:05The class time for both the culinary and the baking and pastry program started at 8 a.m.
02:12I remember I was setting up my station, and I heard a loud shout.
02:16So I walked over to see what was going on, and when I went into the kitchen,
02:21I saw Chef Brophy was on the ground.
02:26He was in front of the ice machine, and he seemed to have fallen backwards.
02:31I thought maybe he'd had a heart attack.
02:33One of my classmates called 9-1-1.
02:389-1-1.
02:39Hi, we are at Oregon Culinary Institute, and there is somebody collapsed in one of our kitchens.
02:45He's one of our chefs, and he's an older man.
02:47All right, is he conscious right now?
02:49No, he is not conscious.
02:50Okay, is anyone doing CPR?
02:52Yes.
02:52Okay, someone's doing CPR right now?
02:54Yes.
02:55Is he doing compressions?
02:57Oh, my God.
02:58Oh, my God.
02:58That morning, about 8-24, a call came in for an unconscious person at the Oregon Culinary
03:08Institute.
03:09It seemed like a normal, typical EMS run with a patient who's having some severe issues that
03:16we need to treat and address.
03:17We were led into the kitchen area where the patient was laying.
03:22The patient wasn't breathing.
03:23He didn't have a pulse.
03:25My firefighter was bearing the chest of Mr. Brophy to put the patches on and to put the
03:29Lucas on.
03:30He said, hey, there's a spot of blood on his chest.
03:32During the process of getting ready to start that IVs, I was moving his arm, a shell casing
03:40rolled out from underneath.
03:42It was a surprise to me.
03:44It was a surprise to everybody, but I immediately stopped the scene.
03:48And the initial thought that ran through my head was, is this a suicide and where's the
03:51gun?
03:53During that sweep of just taking that second, looking around, I saw two shell casings,
04:00and I knew that this was a shooting.
04:02You don't normally shoot yourself twice.
04:05We determined that it was not a survivable event, and we terminated efforts and pronounced
04:10the patient deceased.
04:12At that point, we called for police code three.
04:15Dispatch it in 19.
04:16We need police code three.
04:18Truck four, I copy.
04:19I'm sending code three police.
04:20Yeah, this will be a shooting this summer.
04:24As word of Chet Brophy's death begins to spread, everyone on campus is
04:30spooked and rattled.
04:32I was doing yoga at my home.
04:33I got a call from my colleague.
04:37He said, hey, something happened at school.
04:40Chef Brophy's down.
04:42He's like, okay, I'll go.
04:45I went out in the parking lot, and I was crying because, you know, everyone loves Chef Brophy,
04:50and every student of Brophy's absolutely adored him.
04:54Chef Brophy was the backbone of a lot of my stuff, what I became.
05:05He encouraged me all the time.
05:07Bikram, you can do it.
05:09I've known Chef Brophy for 22 years.
05:13He's like my father.
05:14And we were all discussing it and trying to calm down.
05:23And that's when the SWAT team showed up.
05:29That whole situation dramatically escalated with the response.
05:34Our police patrol officers didn't know if there could have been a shooter still on the premises.
05:39The police scour the campus, but they don't find any suspects.
05:58So they make the tough call to lift the active shooter alert.
06:02That allows investigators in to start piecing together details.
06:07We quickly wanted to determine if there were any students who were missing from that class that day
06:13that may have been responsible for this.
06:16Our concern, obviously, is that somebody's upset with Dan and decided that they're going to take him out.
06:24We did follow-up interviews with each one of those students, and nothing raised any red flags for us.
06:32Everyone just seemed to talk very highly of him.
06:34The first time I met Chef Brophy, he was taking everyone out on a field trip to harvest chanterelle mushrooms.
06:43He was very interested in sustainability, part of his wisdom that he has to share.
06:50Chef Brophy is an encyclopedia of food.
06:54He had so much knowledge in his brain, no one has ever seen.
07:01So he has done so much good things for all the students and community, so they can experience it.
07:09Detectives decide after the interviews that no students were responsible.
07:15As investigators continue to look for evidence, patrol cops spot someone trying to enter the building.
07:22We were notified that Nancy Brophy, the wife, was at the location.
07:27And she had come to the scene because she had heard that there was some kind of situation at the school.
07:37Nancy appeared to be older.
07:39She had gray hair.
07:41She was somewhat overweight, dressed in what looked like elderly women's clothing,
07:46a dark-colored sort of sweater jacket over another blouse.
07:50Knowing that was the spouse of our decedent, we wanted to take the time and explain to her what had happened to give the death notice.
08:01And it's an important part of the process.
08:05We recorded that family notification and we normally don't do that.
08:09The only reason we recorded that interview with her is we knew we had something big on our hands and we didn't want to miss one detail.
08:16We're here with Nancy. And your last name, Nancy?
08:19Brophy.
08:19Brophy. Okay. So, I just want to let you know that, you know, we believe Dan, Dan, we believe it's Dan that's been killed.
08:29Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me the sad sack.
08:33Yeah.
08:34I'm sorry. It's our job to figure out what happened. And that's why we're talking to you.
08:40Oh, sure.
08:41Is there anybody that we know of that wanted to do something to Dan?
08:46He doesn't harbor judges. I mean, he truly doesn't harbor judges when in 25 years of teaching, I have never heard him badmouth a student one time.
08:57Okay.
08:57She tells them, we lived a quiet life. Dan had no enemies. They both loved to cook. And they would take romantic trips, just the two of them. It was a happy life with her husband. They did that for 25 years.
09:12Nancy's statement doesn't give the cops much to go on as far as who killed Dan. But they work late into the night looking into Dan's immediate co-workers for possibilities.
09:25We actually did a lot of research, too, with the administrators of the school. We learned his routine and he was methodical and consistent with it.
09:36He would park his truck on the corner right outside the side door on 17th Avenue. And then he would take the garage roll-up door and open it up to prepare for his class.
09:46But then he would usually leave that door open, or he didn't really, you know, he was just kind of absent-minded when it came to things like that.
09:54We didn't see any signs of forced entry into the location. It looked like somebody came in the door that Daniel Brophy had opened and unlocked and gone through.
10:08We've got so little to go on at this point. It was very much a whodunit.
10:14Realizing that door could have let just about anybody into the building, police pressed the students to see if anyone can describe a possible suspect.
10:25There was one witness that morning that described seeing a vehicle driving quickly out of the area.
10:31A dark SUV. It had been parked directly across the street from Oregon Culinary Institute on the side street.
10:38It looked like a person trying to leave quickly without being seen.
10:42Is it possible that that person could have been involved or assisted in this incident?
10:50His wife, Nancy, wasn't just distraught. She was angry.
10:53She confronted the president of the culinary school and she said, why aren't their cameras displaced?
10:58In this situation, there's two grandmas.
11:00There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
11:05I thought that there had to be an explanation.
11:09I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a grandmother doing something like this.
11:18Police investigating the mysterious shooting death of culinary instructor Daniel Brophy
11:25hear about a suspicious vehicle spotted racing away from the school.
11:30Initially, we investigated that dark SUV and we learned that there was a car repair shop directly across the street from Oregon Culinary Institute on 17th Avenue.
11:43And we learned that the dark SUV was likely workers that were there early in the morning, shuttling cars back and forth to the dealership.
11:56So there was no information of relevance there.
12:00The only evidence we had of the crime were the two spent 9mm or semi-automatic shell casings.
12:07The evidence was small.
12:10We did not locate a weapon.
12:12And there were no eyewitnesses to the actual shooting incident.
12:18There was an alarm system.
12:21Chef Burphy disabled that alarm at 7.21 a.m.
12:24And a lot of the students were arriving at 7.30.
12:27That's a short window of time.
12:30Nobody heard a gunfire.
12:33Nobody saw anybody running around with a gun.
12:36There weren't any cameras inside the building or outside the building.
12:44So at this point, our law enforcement experience was telling us that this could be forced entry, a burglary, a robbery, something of that nature.
12:55Darren, myself, other investigators, we all took different quadrants of the building and started searching for anything out of place.
13:01During the search, one of the interesting things was that Mr. Burphy had his wallet.
13:07The cash and credit cards were all in his wallet.
13:11It didn't look like there was a fight.
13:12And there didn't appear to be anything taken from the Culinary Institute.
13:19This seemed very focused on Mr. Burphy.
13:21The evidence is telling police that someone planned this out and intended to shoot Chef Burphy, hoping they can unmask his killer.
13:34The cops delve into his past.
13:38Dan Burphy was a preacher's son from North Dakota.
13:41From a very young age, he became enchanted by both the cultures of the West and its food.
13:46He wasn't necessarily farm-to-table, but he was backyard-to-table, that's for sure.
13:51So Dan had a first marriage that was tumultuous at best.
13:54They had a son together.
13:55But Dan left and was not involved with his son's life until around high school.
14:00Nancy Burphy was from the right side of the tracks on Wichita Falls, Texas.
14:03She decided that she was going to become a successful caterer.
14:07So she went to culinary school, and that's where she met Dan.
14:12She worked in catering, had a very successful business that she kind of walked away from, inexplicably, to write romance novels.
14:20Nancy was a romance author and the president of my writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers.
14:27So she's the queen bee.
14:29She would celebrate people who had either finished books or published books.
14:32She would give them a rose, and that was a very big honor.
14:38Very few people in the Rose City Romance Writers were full-time writers.
14:44Most of them, like Nancy, were aspiring.
14:50Nancy and Dan did not have children, but Dan had had his son, Nathaniel, when he was married to his first wife.
14:57During the initial notification we had with Nancy, it sounded like she really loved Nathaniel as a son, loved his children.
15:08She considered them her grandchildren, and they would have a lot of family functions and dinners together.
15:14Nancy wanted to be the uber-grandma.
15:16She would say, let's go on a family trip to the zoo or the garden.
15:20She really wanted to be there to have some fun time with the little ones.
15:25It turned out that Dan and Nancy had actually acted as a caregiving couple to a relative of Nancy's, right?
15:33Nancy stepped up and she said, hey, I could take care of a young relative.
15:36I'd love it.
15:40The details seemed to paint the picture of Dan and Nancy as happily married grandparents.
15:47So why would someone want Dan dead?
15:51You know, we had some more information to try to obtain from her because we were still trying to understand Daniel and some of the features.
15:59I think we also asked if Dan would have had a gun with him for safety purposes because he's opening up the building.
16:09She said that they had bought a gun because of school shootings, and she said she believed it was at the house and that they had never used it ever because they realized that after they bought it, they weren't gun people, and so they never did anything with it.
16:23And then what we did is we had two detectives go with her to check on the status of the gun.
16:34When the detectives brought that gun back, it still had the zip ties that are put through the barrel and slide to make it safe.
16:42Never operated, never loaded.
16:45That gun was cleared by the crime lab here in Oregon as not being the gun that fired the two spent casings at our crime scene.
16:52So we knew we didn't have the actual gun responsible for that.
16:57With just no solid leads to work with, the police take another look at the crime scene.
17:04Right across the street on Southwest Jefferson, about a half a block up, we noticed that there were pretty good video cameras on Bellagio's Pizza Store.
17:13We went in, the manager took us to the back video room, and turned the video on.
17:23Cameras were inside the restaurant, but they filmed a perspective that went right through their big front picture windows.
17:31Trying to see if, like, we see somebody running from the place or whatever.
17:34And so, as I'm looking at that, this van drives by.
17:39It was a tan gray Toyota minivan.
17:43It looked like somebody trying to leave the scene.
17:48It was right in the beginning of the morning.
17:50It was 7.28 a.m.
17:53There's literally a student arriving just a couple minutes after that.
17:57That's the right time for when we think this incident has occurred.
18:02We all were like, who's the person in the van?
18:09Portland police set their sights on a suspicious van that left the area right around the time Dan Rofey was shot.
18:18The question is, who was driving?
18:21As I'm looking through the video, and I'm, like, going, that van looks a lot like Nancy's van that Nancy drove to the school that morning.
18:34It looks exactly like it, and that's what he said, and we all were like, whoa.
18:39It looks exactly like it.
18:41We looked at it, and we were like, oh, maybe this is off.
18:44The timestamp might be off, because she just drove down here.
18:47Maybe this is when she first drove down.
18:49But we don't see any crime scene tape.
18:51There's no police anywhere.
18:55I mean, the person who you see in the image, it's hard to see.
18:59There's a lot of reflective issues and whatnot.
19:02But the person fits Nancy's description generally.
19:10This is something that we need to examine further.
19:13Immediately, I had Anthony call our other detectives and asked him to quickly take some pictures of the van as much as he could.
19:26While they were taking the pictures, Nancy says, why are you taking pictures of my van?
19:32I wasn't down there.
19:33And so, to us, that became a big red flag.
19:38With that video possibly showing Nancy right there at the time of the murder, detectives decide to show the DA what they've got.
19:47When I watched the surveillance video from Bellagio's, my reaction was the same as the detectives.
19:55It kind of had a profile that you can make out, a side view profile, that was consistent with Nancy, but nothing that we could be definitive with.
20:04The video wasn't clear enough to really see the driver, and there was no license plate that you could see.
20:12We're not going to go arrest somebody just based on that.
20:15And although I had it in the back of my mind that, you know, Nancy was there, I thought that there had to be an explanation.
20:21I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a grandmother doing something like this.
20:28It's not who fits the mold of a killer.
20:31Since the video's too grainy to prove Nancy was driving, detectives decide to look for more evidence.
20:41Anthony and I were both at the autopsy with the medical examiner.
20:46Through that, we were able to get a feature of the trajectory of the shots through the body.
20:53The gunshot to the back was actually probably the first gunshot, because that hit his spine.
20:59That would have caused him to fall backwards.
21:08The trajectory of the second bullet to the chest was angular, almost as if somebody had come and stepped up over his body and shot into his chest.
21:20It looked like somebody executed Daniel.
21:27We didn't know who was responsible for this.
21:30All we knew is it seemed very personal.
21:32It seemed like somebody went there with vengeance.
21:35Like they wanted to kill Chef Brophy, and that was all they wanted to do.
21:39And they did it in a very tight window of time and were undetected.
21:45Judging by how much this shooting looks like the work of a hitman, the cops just have a hard time believing that Nancy pulled the trigger.
21:53We had a hard time wrapping our minds around the elderly grandmother figure coming in there and executing her husband,
22:01sent her punched in the back and in the chest like an assassin.
22:06Whoever did the shot, shot well.
22:08They knew what they were doing when they shot the handgun, and we just couldn't picture that.
22:12As the search for the killer goes on, Daniel's family and friends gather to say goodbye.
22:22The feeling at the vigil was very positive.
22:27Everyone knew that Chef Brophy wouldn't want us to all just be sad that day,
22:31and instead we talked about all of our favorite things and our favorite moments with Chef Brophy.
22:36I think we all needed that to heal.
22:38We did a spiritual puza, and that's my country.
22:45How we do, the only thing I can share was my love.
22:52We lost someone who was one of a kind.
22:56It was an overwhelming show of support with candles and roses.
23:01His colleagues were there, and Nancy Brophy was there too.
23:06I stood across from her.
23:07I could see how sad she looked.
23:09I thought, this is a heartbroken widow.
23:13Everyone quickly kind of rallied around to support her.
23:17Nancy's the sweet little grandmother who's lost their spouse to a violent crime.
23:23It's just completely out of the realm of what you might expect.
23:27What I came to find out later is that Nancy wasn't just distraught, she was angry.
23:35She confronted the president of the culinary school, and she said,
23:37why aren't there cameras this place?
23:39Why didn't you have better protection here?
23:40If there were some cameras, we would know who had killed my husband.
23:43Nancy was telling people at the vigil who she thought might be suspects.
23:49She talked about Dan's ex-wife, who was apparently motivated somehow to get revenge.
23:55That was a piece of background information on the victim that didn't come up when Nancy was interviewed.
24:01In this situation, there's two grandmas.
24:03There's the real grandma, by blood, before he and Nancy got together.
24:10There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
24:16When we learned about this information, we were like, oh, this is new.
24:25That definitely fueled and motivated us to try to dig that information out where we could.
24:34When you're looking at other options, I think you're always going to look at the ex.
24:38What if there was a motive, even though it's been 25 years, to come and murder somebody?
24:43I think that's something, in any case, you're going to always want to run down and investigate.
24:53When the cops get a tip that Dan Brophy's estranged ex-wife could be connected to his murder,
25:00they find and contact her right away.
25:03We eventually got the contact information for Daniel Brophy's ex-wife, Perla Stillwater,
25:09to make sure there wasn't something there.
25:11Perla Stillwater was very cooperative with us and sat and gave us a long interview.
25:18We found out that even though things had been difficult initially during the divorce
25:23and after the divorce with Daniel and his ex-wife,
25:26things had been resolved and it wasn't necessarily an issue.
25:31There was some healing trying to happen in regards to what had happened in the past.
25:36We didn't uncover really any abuse or mistreatment between Dan and his ex-wife.
25:44They had a decent relationship.
25:46I just didn't understand why Nancy lied about it.
25:49Right away, I thought, what is going on with this woman?
25:54Once they clear Perla Stillwater, investigators keep looking for new suspects.
26:03While we're working on all this information, Nancy called Darren on the phone.
26:08I remember distinctly I was sitting right next to him and he just seems like shocked by whatever she just said.
26:14She's asking me about getting a letter of clearance that she's not a suspect in the case.
26:22And I was like, why would you ask for that?
26:24And what she said was that it was for a small insurance policy and that they needed that so that they could release funds to her.
26:32That's not something the police do.
26:36They don't give letters of exoneration.
26:39And she was very jovial in that call.
26:42She thought it was funny that she needed this letter to send to her insurance company.
26:48During our interaction with Nancy that first day, she was a grieving elderly widow, which was the way we viewed her.
26:55But now she didn't seem really upset.
26:58I would probably say that's when we're going, she's involved somehow.
27:05After this call, the cops decide they better look into the Brophy family financials.
27:12We found out that there were some financial issues with Dan and Nancy.
27:17They weren't making ends meet all that great.
27:21We learned that they had not paid their mortgage several different times over the period of about a year and a half.
27:27But we did note that they were successfully paying all these premiums for the life insurance policies.
27:34When they were added up, they were extensive.
27:38She actually had about $800,000 in life insurance on Dan.
27:43And then because Dan was killed at work, she was going to be entitled to workers' comp.
27:48That was going to be about another $400,000.
27:50Without that, they were about to be very, very broke in just a couple of months.
27:55Things would have been really bad.
27:57When the detectives saw all of these overlapping life insurance policies exclusively taken out on Dan Brophy, they had a motive.
28:08She's stood to gain quite a bit.
28:10But there's only so much you can do without serving warrants, seizing cell phones and computers, searching the property to find every piece of evidence.
28:17We were confident at this point that we had ruled out any other suspects in this case based on the investigation.
28:25We felt 100% confident that that was Nancy's van that drove into the area before his death and left the area right after his death.
28:33Police changed their tune about Nancy Brophy.
28:38This woman they thought was a grieving granny has quickly become their main suspect in her husband's murder.
28:45We had a lot to learn still.
28:49I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that this person who looks like my grandmother could kill.
28:56Nancy did not have any criminal history that we found.
29:03We learned by speaking to her brother-in-law that she had an interesting interaction with one of her family members.
29:10One of her relatives was in trouble criminally, so Nancy and Dan had started to provide care for the relative's child for some time frame here in Portland.
29:23And at some point, Nancy didn't think that the child should return to that house.
29:27And she apparently, according to records we found, attempted to keep the child against the parents' decision-making on this.
29:37Nancy had almost somewhat kidnapped this person for a period of time that was so odd.
29:46Ultimately, the child went back with his parents.
29:51I don't think we really ever understood what was really going on with Nancy at that time,
29:56other than she was expressing a desire to become this child's grandparent, essentially.
30:07Stories from Nancy's past start to reveal she's got more than a few dark corners in her personality.
30:15I think she always leaned into the harmless grandmother stereotype or expectation based on her looks.
30:23Unassuming and quiet and humble.
30:27But by contrast, the Nancy as president, she is up front, at the podium, like a blowhard, like larger than life.
30:38And that was a very specific personality pattern.
30:44Nancy Brophy wanted to be a successful romance novelist.
30:48She'd gone and taken classes.
30:50She'd learned that the way to be a successful romance novelist is to write a series of novels
30:54and give the first one for free and make them buy the rest.
30:56So she published under her own name and she self-published those books.
31:00It was a big dream, but she was never successful.
31:03She was making 10 or 20 bucks off these books.
31:06I think it was horribly embarrassing for Nancy.
31:11She is the president of this group that's supposed to make authors successful.
31:15But she never really built either that audience or got that traditional publishing recognition.
31:23The reality, the financial reality, was that they were really living on the edge.
31:28Several of her friends said that Nancy needed to borrow money from them in order to be able to fund going to some of these writing events and conventions.
31:37We started to find out Nancy was a romance novelist.
31:42People started contacting us because Nancy had written a writer's blog.
31:48And it was how to murder your husband.
31:55It talked about how you go to the person's work site, make sure there's no video cameras, you do these things.
32:00And it was just kind of this theme of a woman character solving her problem by getting rid of a male in her life that was causing all her problems.
32:10It was clickbait.
32:11It was deliberately sensational.
32:14But if you read the comments, it's really quite disturbing.
32:18One person said, I'm going to check on Dan and see if he's okay.
32:21I don't know to what degree she lost herself in her fiction.
32:32I think that a question that we always wanted to understand was Nancy using her books as a trial ground for ultimately acting out that process of shooting your husband, getting away with it,
32:48riding off into the sunset, riding off into the sunset to do the things you wanted to do in life.
32:52She had written that article back in 2011.
32:56But nonetheless, it made us curious about her writing.
32:59It was apparent that she had knowledge of firearms, police procedures, and how somebody might carry out a murder.
33:12With money as a motive and Nancy's writing more than a little suspicious,
33:18the DA gives police the okay to have a tea, watch Nancy's movements.
33:24The idea was that detectives were going to be out on the scene so they could monitor where she was,
33:30because we kind of thought that maybe she had wind, that we were onto her.
33:36So I walked over to the Portland Police Bureau.
33:38We get upstairs, and we're informed that there was some miscommunication on scene,
33:44and she had been arrested.
33:48Whoops!
33:49They jumped the gun with the arrest.
33:53Without the right evidence, the entire case could fall apart.
33:58It was a chaotic moment because Nancy was arrested too soon.
34:03It starts this countdown clock, because suddenly they need to go and show a grand jury that they have proof,
34:09which they weren't quite ready to do.
34:11Nancy was transported back to the detective division.
34:25Darren and I attempted to interview her.
34:28We know that you're involved with your husband's death.
34:33The information's clear.
34:34It shows your vehicle.
34:35It even captures your license plate.
34:37Before you are asked any questions, you must understand your rights.
34:41If I understand those rights, then I have a lawyer.
34:44Okay.
34:45She invoked and asked for an attorney very quickly.
34:50Nancy didn't ask for an explanation about why she was being arrested.
34:54Her response was, oh, you must think I killed my husband.
34:57And it surprised me just because of the lack of emotion that this person was showing.
35:01The clock is ticking, and the cops have to scramble to gather enough evidence to make their case.
35:09We went to the house to execute the search warrant.
35:12We found various life insurance policy documentation that we collected.
35:17We also found documentation of a storage unit that she had purchased.
35:20We conducted a search warrant on that storage unit.
35:26And during that search, a box was located that was marked Scarves, Purses, and GK.
35:35And when they opened that, it was an unbuilt ghost gun.
35:42A ghost gun is an 80% built firearm you could buy online.
35:46It's un-serialized, it's unregistered, and once you buy it and it arrives,
35:52you have to do a couple of things to it in order for it to be an operable firearm.
35:58We realized the gun's never been put together, but she never told us about this gun.
36:03Why would you have a ghost gun, especially that kind of gun that's un-serialized with law enforcement?
36:08So we started developing a running theory once we found that gun,
36:13that that must have been her plan, was to buy a ghost gun.
36:17She could commit the murder with it, she could drop it in one of our many bodies of water,
36:22and nobody would be the wiser, and we'll never find it.
36:26But once she realized that she couldn't build it, she had to come up with another plan.
36:32And that's when we found the other guns.
36:34Once the cops find Nancy Brophy's ghost gun,
36:42they scour every bit of her activity on the internet to see what else she's hiding.
36:49Come to find out, Nancy buys a full-size Glock handgun at a gun show.
36:56And then she was on eBay, and she had purchased the slide and the barrel assemblies that fit onto a Glock handgun.
37:08That gun that she bought at the gun show turned out to be the gun that she had handed over to police on the day of the murder.
37:15So, knowing that that gun was not the murder weapon, we started thinking, well, maybe she swapped the slide and barrel.
37:24Once police had that, if they tested it, it would not be a match,
37:28and would take us off the trail that she possibly did this.
37:33Despite continuous searching, searching of sewers, searching of garbage cans,
37:38we were never able to find the slide and barrel that she bought on eBay.
37:45Unfortunately, ballistics can't match Nancy's gun to the crime.
37:50So, the cops go back to that video of the suspicious van to see what else lines up.
37:57We knew this van fit with the description of the Nancy's van.
38:03So, we started working really hard on the video.
38:06We played with it over and over, trying to grab that one image.
38:10We were able to actually read numbers and letters off the license plate.
38:17And we were able to run reports with DMV.
38:22The only one with that partial plate, make, model, and color, came back to their van, the Brophy van.
38:28And that video also provided for us a really good window of time when she first arrived in the van.
38:37It was 7.08 a.m.
38:40That morning, Dan had put in his pin to disarm the alarm, and he did that at 7.21 a.m.
38:48We have the video that shows the van leaving at 7.28.
38:52And we know the next instructor arrived shortly after 7.30, so we did have a nice, tight window that we could focus on.
39:02We believed that she had parked somewhere in that back block, where there's no video, and saw him park, saw him leave the door open, and went in and did what she did.
39:18That made us feel pretty strong about our case.
39:21With all the evidence he needs, the DA proves to the grand jury that this case is ready to move to trial.
39:35Nancy's trial is delayed for many years.
39:38COVID hits, and the courthouse is shut down.
39:41So she sits in jail for four long years, from 2018 to 2022.
39:51I was very confident that we were going to convict Nancy, as long as our evidence came in the way that we anticipated it.
40:03We wanted an older jury.
40:05We thought a young juror would walk in the courtroom, look at her, she's going to be dressed in nice clothing, she always had a nice scarf on every day, and they're going to see their own grandmother, and not ever be able to convict their own grandmother.
40:23The defense pushed really hard on our theory of the case, she tried to explain what she was doing that morning, why she would have lied about it, because it just came across so insincere.
40:40This was a very tough trial for Dan's family, Dan's son, Dan's mother and father were all there.
40:49They were trying to see justice done for the person who had killed their son, and they're seeing this person deny it all.
40:57It didn't make any sense.
40:58So I said, isn't it possible?
41:01What really drove Nancy to kill was she wanted to change a lifestyle, and Dan couldn't give that to her.
41:15Ultimately, we were left with a good panel.
41:19We went about eight weeks.
41:21This is Brofee if you can rise.
41:22The jury came back with the correct verdict of guilty for murder in the second degree, which carries a life sentence.
41:33With Nancy locked up, Dan's memory lives on in the hearts of those who learned from and loved him.
41:41There's a lot of lasting wisdoms that Jeff Brofee has given to a lot of people.
41:47I wish that he could have continued to teach.
41:50He left a great impact on many people that love him still.
42:04Something I personally struggled with was, how did we even get here?
42:09How does this even happen?
42:10It's hard to believe Nancy Brofee, this elderly lady we just sat with and cried with, that she could have come there and killed him.
42:22Not what you picture in your head when you think grandmother.
42:24How does this even happen?
42:25How does this even happen?
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42:50How does this even happen?
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