- 15 hours ago
A beloved chef and cooking instructor is found shot to death at work, and investigators are left baffled. But when a loved one’s strange behavior draws their attention, detectives discover the killer has been right in front of their eyes.
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00:00Some grannies write recipes, some write birthday cards.
00:08Nancy Crampton Brophy wrote murder novels, but 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, and 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.
01:32Is 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, I 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 911.
02:38911?
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.
02:53Okay, someone's doing CPR right now?
02:54Yes.
02:55Is he doing compressions?
02:57Oh my God.
02:58That morning, about 8.24, a call came in for an unconscious person at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
03:09It seemed like a normal, typical EMS run with a patient who's having some severe issues that we 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 burying the chest to Mr. Brophy to put the patches on and to put the Lucas 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 rolled out from underneath.
03:42It was a surprise to me, it 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 gun?
03:51During that sweep of just taking that second, looking around, I saw two shell casings, and 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 the patient deceased.
04:12At that point, we called for police code 3.
04:15Dispatches in 19, we need police code 3.
04:18Truck 4, I copy, attending code 3 police.
04:20Yeah, this will be a shooting this summer.
04:24As word of Chef Brophy's death begins to spread, everyone on campus is spooked and rattled.
04:32I was doing yoga at my home.
04:34I 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.
04:43I went out in the parking lot, and I was crying because, you know, everyone loves Chef Brophy, and every student of Brophy's absolutely adored him.
04:57Chef Brophy was backbone of a lot of my stuff, what I became.
05:05He encouraged me all the time.
05:06And we were all discussing it and trying to calm down.
05:23And that's when the SWAT team showed up.
05:25That whole situation dramatically escalated with the response.
05:35Our 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.
06:03That 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 that may have been responsible for this.
06:17Our 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.
06:48Chef Brophy is an encyclopedia of food.
06:55He 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.
07:28And she had come to the scene because she had heard that there was some kind of situation at the school.
07:36Nancy appeared to be older.
07:39She had gray hair.
07:41She was somewhat overweight, dressed in what looked like elderly women's clothing.
07:45She was wearing a dark-colored sort of sweater jacket over another blouse.
07:51Knowing 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.
08:17And your last name, Nancy?
08:19Brophy.
08:20Okay.
08:21So, I just want to let you know that, you know, we believe Dan, we believe it's Dan that's been killed.
08:30Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me the sad sack.
08:33Yeah.
08:34I'm sorry.
08:36It's our job to figure out what happened.
08:38And 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?
08:47He doesn't harbor judges.
08:49I mean, he truly doesn't harbor judges.
08:51When in 25 years of teaching, I have never heard him badmouth a student one time.
08:57Okay.
08:58She tells them, we lived a quiet life.
09:00Dan had no enemies.
09:02They both loved to cook, and they would take romantic trips, just the two of them.
09:06And it was a happy life with her husband.
09:10They did that for 25 years.
09:14Nancy's statement doesn't give the cops much to go on as far as who killed Dan.
09:19But they worked late into the night, looking into Dan's immediate coworkers for possibilities.
09:25We actually did a lot of research, too, with the administrators of the school.
09:31We 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.
09:40And 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.
09:58It 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.
10:11It was very much a whodunit.
10:15Realizing that door could have let just about anybody into the building, police pressed the students to see if anyone can describe a possible suspect.
10:24There was one witness that morning that described seeing a vehicle driving quickly out of the area, a dark SUV.
10:33It 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.
10:43Is it possible that that person could have been involved or assisted in this incident?
10:50His wife, Nancy, wasn't just distraught.
10:53She was angry.
10:53She confronted the president of the culinary school, and she said, why aren't there cameras displaced?
10:58In this situation, there's two grandmas.
11:00There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
11:06I 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.
11:14Police investigating the mysterious shooting death of culinary instructor Daniel Brophy hear 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.
11:55So there was no information of relevance there.
11:59So there was no information of relevance there.
12:01The 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, and there were no eyewitnesses to the actual shooting incident.
12:18There was an alarm system.
12:21Chef Brophy disabled that alarm at 7.21 a.m., and 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. Brophy had his wallet.
13:08The cash and credit cards were all in his wallet.
13:11It didn't look like there was a fight, and there didn't appear to be anything taken from the Culinary Institute.
13:17This seemed very focused on Mr. Brophy.
13:23The evidence is telling police that someone planned this out and intended to shoot Chef Brophy, hoping they can unmask his killer that cops delve into his past.
13:37Dan Brophy 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, but Dan left and was not involved with his son's life until around high school.
13:59Nancy Brophy was from the right side of the tracks in Wichita Falls, Texas.
14:04She 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.
14:33She 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.
15:12Nancy 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.
15:24It turned out that Dan and Nancy had actually acted as a caregiving couple to a relative of Nancy, right?
15:33Nancy stepped up and she said, hey, I could take care of a young relative.
15:36I'd love it.
15:37The details seemed to paint the picture of Dan and Nancy as happily married grandparents.
15:47So why would someone want Dan dead?
15:50You 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.
16:08She 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.
16:24And then what we did is we had two detectives go with her to check on the status of the gun.
16:31When the detectives brought that gun back, it still had the zip ties that are put through the barrel and slide to make it safe, never operated, never loaded.
16:44That 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.
16:56With 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.
17:14We went in, the manager took us to the back video room and turned the video on.
17:22Cameras 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.
17:35And 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 lead the scene.
17:47It 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?
18:05Portland police set their sights on a suspicious van that left the area right around the time Dan Brophy was shot.
18:18The question is, who was driving?
18:22As 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.
18:33It looks exactly like it.
18:35And that's what he said.
18:36And 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 time stamp might be off because she just drove down here.
18:47Maybe this is when she first drove down.
18:50But we don't see any crime scene tape.
18:51There's no police anywhere.
18:52I 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.
19:08This is something that we need to examine further.
19:15Immediately, I had Anthony call our other detectives and asked him to quickly take some pictures of the van as much as he could.
19:25And while they were taking the pictures, Nancy says, why are you taking pictures of my van?
19:32I wasn't down there.
19:34And 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 could make out, a side view profile, that was consistent with Nancy, but nothing that we could be definitive with.
20:06The 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.
20:14And 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.
20:27It's not who fits the mold of a killer.
20:33Since 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.
21:00That would have caused him to fall backwards.
21:03The 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.
21:25We 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.
21:44Judging 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.
21:55We had a hard time wrapping our minds around the elderly grandmother figure coming in there and executing her husband,
22:01center 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.
22:11And 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.
22:32And 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.
22:55It was an overwhelming show of support with candles and roses.
23:01His colleagues were there.
23:03And 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.
23:11Everyone 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.
23:34She was angry.
23:35She confronted the president of the culinary school and she said, why 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.
23:45Nancy 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.
24:04There's the real grandma, by blood, before he and Nancy got together.
24:11There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
24:19When 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?
24:44I think that's something, in any case, you're going to always want to run down and investigate.
24:49When the cops get a tip that Dan Brophy's estranged ex-wife could be connected to his murder, they find and contact her right away.
25:03We eventually got the contact information for Daniel Brophy's ex-wife, Perla Stillwater, to make sure there wasn't something there.
25:11We found out that even though things had been difficult initially during the divorce and after the divorce with Daniel and his ex-wife, things had been resolved and it wasn't necessarily an issue.
25:30There was some healing trying to happen in regards to what had happened in the past.
25:37We didn't uncover really any abuse or mistreatment between Dan and his ex-wife.
25:44They had a decent relationship.
25:47I 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.
26:35That's not something the police do.
26:36They don't give letters of exoneration.
26:39And she was very jovial in that call.
26:41She 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.
26:59I would probably say that's when we're going, she's involved somehow.
27:04After 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.
27:20We learned that they had not paid their mortgage several different times over the period of about a year and a half.
27:28But 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.
27:36She 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 to computers, searching the property to find every piece of evidence.
28:18We were confident at this point that we had ruled out any other suspects in this case based on the investigation.
28:24We 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.
28:34Police 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.
28:46We 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.
28:59Nancy 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.
29:16So 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.
29:28And 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.
30:01Stories from Nancy's past start to reveal she's got more than a few dark corners in her personality.
30:14I think she always leaned into the harmless grandmother stereotype or expectation based on her looks.
30:23Unassuming and quiet and humble.
30:28But 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.
30:42Nancy 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 and 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.
31:01It was a big dream, but she was never successful.
31:03She was making 10 or 20 bucks off these books.
31:07I think it was horribly embarrassing for Nancy.
31:09She is the president of this group that's supposed to make authors successful.
31:16But 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.
31:27Several 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.
31:38We started to find out Nancy was a romance novelist.
31:42People started contacting us because Nancy had written a writer's blog.
31:48It talked about how you go to the person's work site, make sure there's no video cameras, you do these things.
32:01And 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.
32:09It was clickbait, it was deliberately sensational, but 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,
32:47and getting away with it, riding off into the sunset to do the things you wanted to do in life.
32:53She had written that article back in 2011, but 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.
33:08With money as a motive, and Nancy's writing more than a little suspicious, the DA gives police the okay to have a team 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.
33:35So I walked over to the Portland Police Bureau, we get upstairs, and we're informed that there was some miscommunication on scene, and she had been arrested.
33:48Whoops! They 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.
34:27We 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.
34:38Before you are asked any questions, you must understand your rights.
34:41If I understand those rights, then I have a lawyer.
34:44Okay.
34:46She invoked and asked for an attorney very quickly.
34:50Nancy didn't ask for an explanation about why she was being arrested.
34:53Her 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.
35:03The 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.
35:16We 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.
35:42The ghost gun is an 80% built firearm.
35:45You could buy online.
35:46It's un-serialized.
35:48It's unregistered.
35:49And once you buy it and it arrives, you 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.
36:01But 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?
36:09So we started developing a running theory once we found that gun, that that must have been her plan, was to buy a ghost gun.
36:17She could commit the murder with it.
36:19She could drop it in one of our many bodies of water.
36:22And nobody would be the wiser.
36:25And 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, they 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 and would take us off the trail that she possibly did this.
37:33Despite continuous searching, searching of sewers, searching of garbage cans, we 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.
37:51So, the cops go back to that video of the suspicious van to see what else lines up.
37:58We knew this van fit with the description of 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.
38:15And 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.
38:31And 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.
38:39That morning, Dan had put in his pin to disarm the alarm.
38:45And 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.
38:57So, 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,
39:06and saw him park, saw him leave the door open, and went in and did what she did.
39:14That made us feel pretty strong about our case.
39:23With all the evidence he needs, the DA proves to the grand jury that this case is ready to move to trial.
39:32Nancy's trial is delayed for many years.
39:38COVID hits, and the courthouses shut down.
39:41So, she sits in jail for four long years, from 2018 to 2022.
39:46I 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.
40:06We thought a young juror would walk in the courtroom, look at her.
40:12She's going to be dressed in nice clothing.
40:14She always had a nice scarf on every day.
40:16And they're going to see their own grandmother, and not ever be able to convict their own grandmother.
40:26The defense pushed really hard on our theory of the case.
40:31She tried to explain what she was doing that morning, why she would have lied about it,
40:37because it just came across so insincere.
40:40This was a very tough trial for Dan's family.
40:46Dan'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.
40:54And they're seeing this person deny it all.
40:57It didn't make any sense.
40:59So I said, isn't it possible?
41:01What really drove Nancy to kill was she wanted to change a lifestyle.
41:05And 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 poor if you can rise.
41:22The jury came back with the correct verdict of guilty for murder in the second degree,
41:28which 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.
41:40There's a lot of lasting wisdoms that Jeff Brophy has given to a lot of people.
41:47I wish that he could have continued to teach.
41:51He left a great impact on many people that love him still.
41:55Something I personally struggled with was, how did we even get here?
42:09How does this even happen?
42:11It's hard to believe Nancy Brophy, this elderly lady we just sat with and cried with,
42:17that she could have come there and killed him.
42:22Not what you picture in your head when you think, grandmother.
42:25But what you think, grandmother.
42:27You
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