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Killer Grannies Season 1 Episode 1
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Short filmTranscript
00:00recipes. Some write birthday cards. Nancy Crampton Brophy wrote murder novels, but
00:07when her husband was killed in broad daylight, the question became, was this
00:12fiction or something far stranger?
00:18The fire department personnel realized that there was a shooting that had
00:22occurred. A medical emergency at Oregon Culinary Institute becomes something
00:29much, much darker.
00:32Things weren't right when we responded. We expected to see a forced entry, a burglary,
00:39a robbery, and we weren't seeing any of those indicators. We were all interviewed
00:44and the questions were a blur. Somebody that could plan something like this out
00:52is definitely an anomaly. It looks like the killer planned the perfect crime
00:58until a shocking suspect is uncovered. Nancy was a romance author and the
01:06president of my writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers. So she's the queen bee.
01:11She lost herself in her fiction. It was deliberately sensational.
01:17She seemed like a good grandma. Even did some babysitting at some point. We had a hard time wrapping our minds around
01:25her being involved in her husband's death. Is she a cold-blooded killer or just somebody's grandmother?
01:33At the time, I was a student at the Oregon Culinary Institute. That morning was a normal day. The class time for both the
02:03culinary and the baking and pastry program started at 8 a.m.
02:07I remember I was setting up my station and I heard a loud shout.
02:12So I walked over to see what was going on and when I went into the kitchen, I saw Chef Brophy was on the ground.
02:20He was in front of the ice machine and he seemed to have fallen backwards. I thought maybe he'd had a heart attack.
02:28One of my classmates called 9-1-1.
02:319-1-1.
02:33Hi, we are at Oregon Culinary Institute and there is somebody collapsed in one of our kitchens.
02:40He's one of our chefs and he's an older man.
02:42All right, is he conscious right now?
02:44No, he is not conscious.
02:45Okay, is anyone doing CPR?
02:47Yes.
02:47Okay, someone's doing CPR right now?
02:49Yes, is he doing compressions?
02:51Oh my God.
02:53That morning, about 8-24, a call came in for an unconscious person at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
03:05It seemed like a normal, typical EMS run with a patient who's having some severe issues that we need to treat and address.
03:13We were led into the kitchen area where the patient was laying.
03:17The patient wasn't breathing, he didn't have a pulse.
03:20My firefighter was bearing the chest of Mr. Brophy to put the patches on and to put the Lucas on.
03:25He said, hey, there's a spot of blood on his chest.
03:28During the process of getting ready to start that IVs, I was moving his arm, a shell casing rolled out from underneath.
03:37It was a surprise to me, it was a surprise to everybody, but I immediately stopped the scene.
03:42And the initial thought that ran through my head was, is this a suicide and where's the gun?
03:47During that sweep of just taking that second, looking around, I saw two shell casings, and I knew that this was a shooting.
03:57You don't normally shoot yourself twice.
03:59We determined that it was not a survivable event, and we terminated efforts and pronounced the patient deceased.
04:06At that point, we called for police code 3.
04:09Dispatches in 19, we need police code 3.
04:12Truck 4, I copy, attending code 3 police.
04:15Yeah, this will be a shooting this summer.
04:19As word of Chef Brophy's death begins to spread, everyone on campus is spooked and rattled.
04:26I was doing yoga at my home.
04:28I got a call from my colleague.
04:31He said, hey, something happened at school.
04:34Chef Brophy's down.
04:36He's like, okay, I'll go.
04:39I went out in the parking lot, and I was crying because, you know, everyone loves Chef Brophy,
04:45and every student of Brophy's absolutely adored him.
04:49Chef Brophy was backbone of me.
04:55A lot of my stuff, what I became, encouraged me all the time.
05:02Become, you can do it.
05:04I've known Chef Brophy for 22 years.
05:07He's like my father.
05:10And we were all discussing it and trying to calm down.
05:16And that's when the SWAT team showed up.
05:20That whole situation dramatically escalated with the response.
05:29Our police patrol officers didn't know if there could have been a shooter still on the premises.
05:34The police scour the campus, but they don't find any suspects, so they make the tough call to lift the active shooter alert.
05:43That allows investigators in to start piecing together details.
05:58We quickly wanted to determine if there were any students who were missing from that class that day that may have been responsible for this.
06:11Our concern, obviously, is that somebody's upset with Dan and decided that they're going to take him out.
06:20We did follow-up interviews with each one of those students, and nothing raised any red flags for us.
06:26Everyone just seemed to talk very highly of him.
06:30The first time I met Chef Brophy, he was taking everyone out on a field trip to harvest chanterelle mushrooms.
06:38He was very interested in sustainability, part of his wisdom that he has to share.
06:45Chef Brophy is an encyclopedia of food.
06:50He had so much knowledge in his brain, no one has ever seen.
06:56He has done so much good things for all the students and community, so they can experience it.
07:04Detectives decide after the interviews that no students were responsible.
07:10As investigators continue to look for evidence, patrol cops spot someone trying to enter the building.
07:17We were notified that Nancy Brophy, the wife, was at the location.
07:23And she had come to the scene because she had heard that there was some kind of situation at the school.
07:32Nancy appeared to be older. She had gray hair.
07:36She was somewhat overweight, dressed in what looked like elderly women's clothing,
07:41a dark-colored sort of sweater jacket over another blouse.
07:46Knowing 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.
07:56And it's an important part of the process.
07:59We recorded that family notification and we normally don't do that.
08:04The 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.
08:10We're here with Nancy, and your last name Nancy?
08:14Brophy.
08:15Okay.
08:16So, I just want to let you know that we believe it's Dan that's revealed.
08:24Okay.
08:25Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me the sad sack look.
08:28Yeah.
08:29Yeah.
08:30I am sorry.
08:31Um, it's our job to figure out what happened.
08:33And that's why we're talking to you.
08:35Oh, sure.
08:36Is there anybody that, you know, that wanted to do something to Dan?
08:41He doesn't harbor judges.
08:42I mean, he truly doesn't harbor judges when, in 25 years of teaching, I have never heard him badmouth a student at one time.
08:53She tells them, we lived a quiet life.
08:55Dan had no enemies.
08:57They both loved to cook and they would take romantic trips, just the two of them.
09:02It was a happy life with her husband.
09:05They did that for 25 years.
09:08Nancy's statement doesn't give the cops much to go on as far as who killed Dan.
09:14But they worked late into the night looking into Dan's immediate co-workers for possibilities.
09:21We actually did a lot of research, too, with the administrators of the school.
09:26We learned his routine and he was methodical and consistent with it.
09:31He would park his truck on the corner right outside the side door on 17th Avenue.
09:36And then he would take the garage roll-up door and open it up to prepare for his class.
09:41But 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.
09:49We didn't see any signs of forced entry into the location.
09:53It looked like somebody came in the door that Daniel Brophy had opened and unlocked and gone through.
10:03We've got so little to go on at this point.
10:06It was very much a whodunit.
10:09Realizing that door could have let just about anybody into the building, police pressed the students to see if anyone can describe a possible suspect.
10:19There was one witness that morning that described seeing a vehicle driving quickly out of the area.
10:26A dark SUV.
10:28It had been parked directly across the street from Oregon Culinary Institute on the side street.
10:33It looked like a person trying to leave quickly without being seen.
10:38Is it possible that that person could have been involved or assisted in this incident?
10:43His wife, Nancy, wasn't just distraught.
10:48She was angry.
10:49She confronted the president of the culinary school and she said, why aren't there cameras displaced?
10:53In this situation, there's two grandmas.
10:55There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
11:01I thought that there had to be an explanation.
11:04I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a grandmother doing something like this.
11:13Police investigating the mysterious shooting death of culinary instructor Daniel Brophy hear about a suspicious vehicle spotted racing away from the school.
11:25Initially, 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.
11:38And we learned that the dark SUV was likely workers that were there early in the morning shuttling cars back and forth to the dealership.
11:51So there was no information of relevance there.
11:55The only evidence we had of the crime were the two spent 9mm semi-automatic shell casings.
12:02The evidence was small.
12:05We did not locate a weapon.
12:07And there were no eyewitnesses to the actual shooting incident.
12:13There was an alarm system.
12:15Chef Brophy disabled that alarm at 721 a.m.
12:19And a lot of the students were arriving at 730.
12:22That's a short window of time.
12:24Nobody heard a gunfire.
12:27Nobody saw anybody running around with a gun.
12:31There weren't any cameras inside the building or outside the building.
12:35So at this point, our law enforcement experience was telling us that this could be forced entry, a burglary, a robbery, something of that nature.
12:49Darren, myself, other investigators, we all took different quadrants of the building and started searching for anything out of place.
12:56During the search, one of the interesting things was that Mr. Brophy had his wallet.
13:02The cash and credit cards were all in his wallet.
13:05It didn't look like there was a fight.
13:08And there didn't appear to be anything taken from the Culinary Institute.
13:13This seemed very focused on Mr. Brophy.
13:18The 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.
13:33Dan Brophy was a preacher's son from North Dakota.
13:36From a very young age, he became enchanted by both the cultures of the West and its food.
13:41He wasn't necessarily farm to table, but he was backyard to table, that's for sure.
13:46So Dan had a first marriage that was tumultuous at best.
13:49They had a son together, but Dan left and was not involved with his son's life until around high school.
13:55Nancy Brophy was from the right side of the tracks on Wichita Falls, Texas.
13:59She decided that she was going to become a successful caterer.
14:02So she went to culinary school, and that's where she met Dan.
14:06She worked in catering, had a very successful business that she kind of walked away from, inexplicably, to write romance novels.
14:15Nancy was a romance author and the president of my writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers.
14:22So she's the queen bee.
14:24She would celebrate people who had either finished books or published books.
14:28She would give them a rose, and that was a very big honor.
14:33Very few people in the Rose City Romance Writers were full-time writers.
14:39Most of them, like Nancy, were aspiring.
14:41Nancy and Dan did not have children, but Dan had had his son, Nathaniel, when he was married to his first wife.
14:53During the initial notification we had with Nancy, it sounded like she really loved Nathaniel as a son, loved his children.
15:02She considered them her grandchildren, and they would have a lot of family functions and dinners together.
15:08Nancy wanted to be the uber-grandma.
15:11She would say, let's go on a family trip to the zoo or the garden.
15:15She really wanted to be there to have some fun time with the little ones.
15:19It turned out that Dan and Nancy had actually acted as a caregiving couple to a relative of Nancy's, right?
15:28Nancy stepped up and she said, hey, I could take care of a young relative. I'd love it.
15:33Nancy stepped up and she said, well, I don't know.
15:36The details seemed to paint the picture of Dan and Nancy as happily married grandparents.
15:42So why would someone want Dan dead?
15:45You 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.
15:54I think we also asked if Dan would have had a gun with him for safety purposes because he's opening up the building.
16:04She said that they had bought a gun because of school shootings.
16:09And 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.
16:16And so they never did anything with it.
16:19And then what we did is we had two detectives go with her to check on the status of the gun.
16:26When the detectives brought that gun back, it still had the zip ties that are put through the barrel and slide to make it safe.
16:37Never operated, never loaded.
16:39That 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.
16:47So we knew we didn't have the actual gun responsible for that.
16:52With just no solid leads to work with, the police take another look at the crime scene.
16:59Right across the street on Southwest Jefferson, about half a block up, we noticed that there were pretty good video cameras on Bellagio's Pizza Store.
17:10We went in, manager took us to the back video room and turned the video on.
17:17Cameras were inside the restaurant, but they filmed a perspective that went right through their big front picture windows.
17:25Trying to see if like we see somebody running from the place or whatever.
17:29And so as I'm looking at that, this van drives by.
17:34It was a tan gray Toyota minivan.
17:37It looked like somebody trying to leave the scene.
17:42It was right in the beginning of the morning.
17:45It was 7.28 a.m.
17:47There's literally a student arriving just a couple minutes after that.
17:52That's the right time for when we think this incident has occurred.
17:56We all were like, who's the person in the van?
18:00Portland police set their sights on a suspicious van that left the area right around the time Dan Brophy was shot.
18:13The question is, who was driving?
18:17As 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.
18:28It looks exactly like it.
18:30And that's what he said.
18:31And we all were like, whoa, it looks exactly like it.
18:36We looked at it and we were like, oh, maybe this is off.
18:39The time stamp might be off because she just drove down here.
18:42Maybe this is when she first drove down.
18:44But we don't see any crime scene tape.
18:46There's no police anywhere.
18:49I mean, the person who you see in the image, it's hard to see.
18:54There's a lot of reflective issues and whatnot.
18:57But the person fits Nancy's description generally.
19:05This is something that we need to examine further.
19:09Immediately, I had Anthony call our other detectives and asked him to quickly take some pictures of the van as much as he could.
19:21While they were taking the pictures, Nancy says, why are you taking pictures of my van?
19:27I wasn't down there.
19:29And so to us, that became a big red flag.
19:33With that video possibly showing Nancy right there at the time of the murder, detectives decide to show the DA what they've got.
19:44When I watched the surveillance video from Bellagio's, my reaction was the same as the detective's.
19:50It 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.
19:59The video wasn't clear enough to really see the driver, and there was no license plate that you could see.
20:06We're not going to go arrest somebody just based on that.
20:09And 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.
20:16I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a grandmother doing something like this.
20:22It's not who fits the mold of a killer.
20:26Since the video's too grainy to prove Nancy was driving, detectives decide to look for more evidence.
20:36Anthony and I were both at the autopsy with the medical examiner.
20:41Through that, we were able to get a feature of the trajectory of the shots through the body.
20:47The gunshot to the back was actually probably the first gunshot because that hit his spine.
20:55That would have caused him to fall backwards.
20:59The 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.
21:15It looked like somebody executed Daniel.
21:23We didn't know who was responsible for this.
21:25All we knew is it seemed very personal.
21:27It seemed like somebody went there with vengeance, like they wanted to kill Chef Brophy and that was all they wanted to do.
21:34And they did it in a very tight window of time and were undetected.
21:40Judging by how much this shooting looks like the work of the hitman, the cops just have a hard time believing that Nancy pulled the trigger.
21:50We had a hard time wrapping our minds around the elderly grandmother figure coming in there and executing her husband, center punched in the back and in the chest like an assassin.
22:00Whoever did the shot, shot well.
22:03They knew what they were doing when they shot the handgun.
22:05And we just couldn't picture that.
22:07As the search for the killer goes on, Daniel's family and friends gather to say goodbye.
22:15The feeling at the vigil was very positive.
22:21Everyone knew that Chef Brophy wouldn't want us to all just be sad that day.
22:26Instead, we talked about all of our favorite things and our favorite moments with Chef Brophy.
22:31I think we all needed that to heal.
22:35We did a spiritual puza and that's my country.
22:40How we do, the only thing I can share was my love.
22:46We lost someone who was one of a kind.
22:51It was an overwhelming show of support with candles and roses.
22:56His colleagues were there and Nancy Brophy was there too.
23:00I stood across from her.
23:02I could see how sad she looked.
23:04I thought this is a heartbroken widow.
23:06Everyone quickly kind of rallied around to support her.
23:11Nancy's the sweet little grandmother who's lost their spouse to a violent crime.
23:17It's just completely out of the realm of what you might expect.
23:22What I came to find out later is that Nancy wasn't just distraught.
23:28She was angry.
23:29She confronted the president of the culinary school and she said,
23:32why aren't there cameras this place?
23:33Why didn't you have better protection here?
23:35If there were some cameras, we would know who had killed my husband.
23:38Nancy was telling people at the vigil who she thought might be suspects.
23:44She talked about Dan's ex-wife who was apparently motivated somehow to get revenge.
23:50That was a piece of background information on the victim that didn't come up when Nancy was interviewed.
23:56In this situation, there's two grandmas.
23:58There's the real grandma by blood before he and Nancy got together.
24:05There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
24:11When we learned about this information, we were like, oh, this is new.
24:20That definitely fueled and motivated us to try to dig that information out where we could.
24:28When you're looking at other options, I think you're always going to look at the ex.
24:33What if there was a motive, even though it's been 25 years, to come and murder somebody?
24:38I think that's something, in any case, you're going to always want to run down and investigate.
24:42When 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.
24:57We eventually got the contact information for Daniel Brophy's ex-wife, Perla Stillwater, to make sure there wasn't something there.
25:06Perla Stillwater was very cooperative with us and sat and gave us a long interview.
25:12We 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.
25:26There was some healing trying to happen in regards to what had happened in the past.
25:31We didn't uncover really any abuse or mistreatment between Dan and his ex-wife.
25:39They had a decent relationship.
25:41I just didn't understand why Nancy lied about it.
25:44Right away, I thought, what is going on with this woman?
25:50Once they clear Perla Stillwater, investigators keep looking for new suspects.
25:57While we're working on all this information, Nancy called Darren on the phone.
26:03I remember distinctly I was sitting right next to him and he just seems like shocked by whatever she just said.
26:10She's asking me about getting a letter of clearance that she's not a suspect in the case.
26:16And I was like, why would you ask for that?
26:19And 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.
26:29That's not something the police do.
26:31They don't give letters of exoneration.
26:33And she was very jovial in that call.
26:36She thought it was funny that she needed this letter to send to her insurance company.
26:42During our interaction with Nancy that first day, she was a grieving elderly widow, which was the way we viewed her.
26:50But now she didn't seem really upset.
26:54I would probably say that's when we're going, she's involved somehow.
26:59After this call, the cops decide they better look into the Brophy family financials.
27:07We found out that there were some financial issues with Dan and Nancy.
27:12They weren't making ends meet all that great.
27:15We learned that they had not paid their mortgage several different times over the period of about a year and a half.
27:23But we did note that they were successfully paying all these premiums for the life insurance policies.
27:29When they were added up, they were extensive.
27:33She actually had about $800,000 in life insurance on Dan.
27:38And then because Dan was killed at work, she was going to be entitled to workers' comp.
27:43That was going to be about another $400,000.
27:45Without that, they were about to be very, very broke in just a couple of months.
27:50Things would have been really bad.
27:54When the detectives saw all of these overlapping life insurance policies exclusively taken out on Dan Brophy, they had a motive.
28:03She stood to gain quite a bit.
28:05But 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.
28:12We were confident at this point that we had ruled out any other suspects in this case based on the investigation.
28:19We 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.
28:28Police changed their tune about Nancy Brophy.
28:33This woman they thought was a grieving granny has quickly become their main suspect in her husband's murder.
28:40We had a lot to learn still.
28:43I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that this person who looks like my grandmother could kill.
28:53Nancy did not have any criminal history that we found.
28:58We learned by speaking to her brother-in-law that she had an interesting interaction with one of her family members.
29:06One of her relatives was in trouble criminally.
29:11So Nancy and Dan had started to provide care for the relatives' child for some timeframe here in Portland.
29:18And at some point, Nancy didn't think that the child should return to that house.
29:22And she apparently, according to records we found, attempted to keep the child against the parents' decision making on this.
29:32Nancy had almost somewhat kidnapped this person for a period of time that was so odd.
29:41Ultimately, the child went back with his parents.
29:46I don't think we really ever understood what was really going on with Nancy at that time,
29:51other than she was expressing a desire to become this child's grandparent, essentially.
30:02Stories from Nancy's past start to reveal she's got more than a few dark corners in her personality.
30:10I think she always leaned into the harmless grandmother stereotype or expectation based on her looks.
30:18Unassuming and quiet and humble.
30:23But by contrast, the Nancy as president, she is up front at the podium like a blowhard, like larger than life.
30:33And that was a very specific personality pattern.
30:38Nancy Brophy wanted to be a successful romance novelist.
30:42She'd gone and taken classes.
30:44She'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.
30:51So she published under her own name and she self published those books.
30:55It was a big dream, but she was never successful.
30:58She was making 10 or 20 bucks off these books.
31:01I think it was horribly embarrassing for Nancy.
31:06She is the president of this group that's supposed to make authors successful.
31:11But she never really built either that audience or got that traditional publishing recognition.
31:18The reality, the financial reality was that they were really living on the edge.
31:23Several 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.
31:33We started to find out Nancy was a romance novelist.
31:37People started contacting us because Nancy had written a writer's blog.
31:43And it was how to murder your husband.
31:47They talked about how you go to the person's work site, make sure there's no video cameras, you do these things.
31:56And 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.
32:04It was clickbait. It was deliberately sensational.
32:08But if you read the comments, it's really quite disturbing.
32:12One 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.
32:27I 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, riding off into the sunset to do the things you wanted to do in life.
32:47She had written that article back in 2011, but nonetheless, it made us curious about her writing.
32:54It was apparent that she had knowledge of firearms, police procedures, and how somebody might carry out a murder.
33:04With 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.
33:19The idea was that detectives were going to be out on scene so they could monitor where she was, because we kind of thought that maybe she had wind, that we were onto her.
33:30So 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.
33:43Whoops! They jumped the gun with the arrest. Without the right evidence, the entire case could fall apart.
33:53It was a chaotic moment because Nancy was arrested too soon.
33:58It starts this countdown clock because suddenly they need to go and show a grand jury that they have proof, which they weren't quite ready to do.
34:06Nancy was transported back to the detective division. Darren and I attempted to interview her.
34:23We know that you're involved with your husband's death. The information's clear. It shows your vehicle. It even captures your license plate.
34:33Before you are asked any questions, you must understand your rights.
34:37Since they understand those rights, then I have a lawyer.
34:40Okay.
34:41She invoked and asked for an attorney very quickly.
34:45Nancy didn't ask for an explanation about why she was being arrested.
34:49Her response was, oh, you must think I killed my husband.
34:52And it surprised me just because of the lack of emotion that this person was showing.
34:57The clock is ticking, and the cops have to scramble to gather enough evidence to make their case.
35:03We went to the house to execute the search warrant. We found various life insurance policy documentation that we collected.
35:12We also found documentation of a storage unit that she had purchased.
35:17We conducted a search warrant on that storage unit, and during that search, a box was located that was marked scarves, purses, and GK.
35:29And when they opened that, it was an unbuilt ghost gun.
35:36A ghost gun is an 80% built firearm. You could buy online. It's unserialized. It's unregistered.
35:44And 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.
35:52We realized the gun's never been put together, but she never told us about this gun.
35:59Why would you have a ghost gun, especially that kind of gun that's unserialized with law enforcement?
36:04So we started developing a running theory once we found that gun, that that must have been her plan, was to buy a ghost gun.
36:11She could commit the murder with it, she could drop it in one of our many bodies of water, and nobody would be the wiser, and we'll never find it.
36:22But once she realized that she couldn't build it, she had to come up with another plan.
36:27And that's when we found the other guns.
36:29Once 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.
36:43Come to find out, Nancy buys a full-size Glock handgun at a gun show.
36:51And then she was on eBay, and she had purchased the slide and the barrel assemblies that fit onto a Glock handgun.
37:03That 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.
37:11So, knowing that that gun was not the murder weapon, we started thinking, well, maybe she swapped the slide and barrel.
37:18Once 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.
37:26Despite continuous searching, searching of sewers, searching of garbage cans, we were never able to find the slide and barrel that she bought on eBay.
37:40Unfortunately, ballistics can't match Nancy's gun to the crime.
37:46So the cops go back to that video of the suspicious van to see what else lines up.
37:52We knew this van fit with the description of the Finances van.
37:58So we started working really hard on the video.
38:01We played with it over and over, trying to grab that one image.
38:05We were able to actually read numbers and letters off the license plate.
38:13And we were able to run reports with DMV.
38:16The only one with that partial plate, make, model, and color came back to their van, the Brophy van.
38:26And that video also provided for us a really good window of time when she first arrived in the van.
38:32It was 7.08 a.m.
38:33That morning, Dan had put in his pin to disarm the alarm, and he did that at 7.21 a.m.
38:43We have the video that shows the van leaving at 7.28.
38:47And we know the next instructor arrived shortly after 7.30, so we did have a nice, tight window that we could focus on.
38:57We believe 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.
39:09That made us feel pretty strong about our case.
39:17With all the evidence he needs, the DA proves to the grand jury that this case is ready to move to trial.
39:26Nancy's trial is delayed for many years. COVID hits, and the courthouses shut down. So she sits in jail for four long years, from 2018 to 2022.
39:41I was very confident that we were going to convict Nancy as long as our evidence came in the way that we anticipated it.
39:56We wanted an older jury. We 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.
40:17The 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.
40:35This was a very tough trial for Dan's family. Dan's son, Dan's mother and father were all there. They were trying to see justice done for the person who had killed their son, and they're seeing this person deny it all.
40:51It didn't make any sense. So I said, isn't it possible? What really drove Nancy to kill was she wanted to change a lifestyle, and Dan couldn't give that to her.
41:02Ultimately, we were left with a good panel. We went about eight weeks.
41:15This is poor if you can rise.
41:17The jury came back with the correct verdict of guilty for murder in the second degree, which carries a life sentence.
41:25With Nancy locked up, Dan's memory lives on in the hearts of those who learned from and loved him.
41:36There's a lot of lasting wisdoms that Jeff Brophy has given to a lot of people.
41:42I wish that he could have continued to teach. He left a great impact on many people that love him still.
41:51Something I personally struggled with was, how did we even get here? How does this even happen?
42:05It's hard to believe Nancy Brophy, this elderly lady we just sat with and cried with, that she could have come there and killed him.
42:14Not what you picture in your head when you think grandmother.
42:19All right.
42:20End
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42:28End
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