Killer Grannies - Season 1 Episode 01- Granny's Fatal Fantasy
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00:00recipes. Some write birthday cards. Nancy Crampton Brophy wrote murder novels, but when her husband
00:08was killed in broad daylight, the question became, was this fiction or something far stranger?
00:18The fire department personnel realized that there was a shooting that had occurred.
00:23A medical emergency at Oregon Culinary Institute becomes something much, much darker.
00:33Things 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 and the
00:46questions were a blur. Somebody that could plan something like this out is definitely an anomaly.
00:55It looks like the killer planned the perfect crime until a shocking suspect is uncovered.
01:03Nancy was a romance author and the president of my writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers.
01:10So she's the queen bee. She lost herself in her fiction. It was deliberately sensational.
01:18She seemed like a good grandma. Even did some babysitting at some point.
01:23We had a hard time wrapping our minds around her being involved in her husband's death.
01:27Is she a cold-blooded killer or just somebody's grandmother?
01:43Is she a cold-blooded killer or just a cold-blooded killer or just a cold-blooded killer?
01:52At the time, I was a student at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
01:58That morning was a normal day.
02:02The class time for both the culinary 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. So I walked over to see what was going
02:14on and when I went into the kitchen, I saw Chef Brophy was on the ground. He was in front of the ice
02:22machine and he seemed to have fallen backwards. I thought maybe he'd had a heart attack. One of my
02:30classmates called 911.
02:35Hi, 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.
02:50Is he doing compressions?
02:51Oh my God.
02:52That 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
03:11need to treat and address. We were led into the kitchen area where the patient was laying. The
03:17patient wasn't breathing. He didn't have a pulse.
03:20My firefighter was burying the chest of Mr. Brophy to put the patches on and to put the Lucas on.
03:25And he said, hey, there's a spot of blood on his chest.
03:30During the process of getting ready to start that IVs, I was moving his arm, a shell casing rolled out
03:35from underneath. It was a surprise to me. It was a surprise to everybody, but I immediately stopped
03:41the scene. And the initial thought that ran through my head was, is this a suicide and where's the gun?
03:46During that sweep of just taking that second, looking around, I saw two shell casings,
03:55and I knew that this was a shooting. You don't normally shoot yourself twice.
04:00We determined that it was not a survivable event, and we terminated efforts and pronounced the patient
04:06deceased. At that point, we called for police code three.
04:10As word of Chef Brophy's death begins to spread, everyone on campus is spooked
04:25and rattled.
04:26I was doing yoga at my home. I got a call from my colleague that, hey, something happened at school.
04:35Chef Brophy is down. Like, okay, I'll go.
04:38I went out in the parking lot, and I was crying because, you know, everyone loves Chef Brophy, and
04:46every student of Brophy's absolutely adored him.
04:53Chef Brophy was backbone of a lot of my stuff, what I became. He encouraged me all the time.
05:01Bikram, you can do it. I known Chef Brophy for 22 years. He's like my father.
05:09And we were all discussing it and trying to calm down.
05:18And that's when the SWAT team showed up.
05:24That whole situation dramatically escalated with the response. Our police patrol officers
05:31didn'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
05:55the active shooter alert. That allows investigators in to start piecing together details.
06:02We quickly wanted to determine if there were any students who were missing from that class that day
06:08that may have been responsible for this. Our concern obviously is that somebody is upset with
06:15Dan and decided that they're going to take him out. We did follow-up interviews with each one of those
06:22students and nothing raised any red flags for us. Everyone just seemed to talk very highly of him.
06:29The first time I met Chef Brophy, he was taking everyone out on a field trip to harvest
06:36chanterelle mushrooms. He was very interested in sustainability. Part of his wisdom that he has to share.
06:43Chef Brophy is an encyclopedia of food. He had so much knowledge in his brain. No one has ever seen.
06:54So he 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. And she had come to the scene
07:25because she had heard that there was some kind of situation at the school.
07:32Nancy appeared to be older. She had gray hair. She was somewhat overweight, dressed in what looked like
07:39elderly women's clothing, a 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
07:53happened to give the death notice. And it's an important part of the process.
08:00We recorded that family notification and we normally don't do that. The only reason we recorded that
08:06interview with her is we knew we had something big on our hands and we didn't want to miss one detail.
08:11Uh, we're here with Nancy. I'm your last name, Nancy?
08:14Brophy.
08:15Okay. So, I just want to let you know that, you know, we believe Dan, Dan, we believe it's Dan that's
08:23been killed.
08:24Okay.
08:25Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me the sad sack look.
08:28Yeah.
08:28Yeah.
08:29I'm sorry. Um, it's our job to figure out what happened. And that's why we're talking to you.
08:35Oh, sure.
08:36Is there anybody that you know of that wanted to do something to Dan?
08:42He doesn't harbor grudges. I mean, he truly doesn't harbor judges when
08:48in 25 years of teaching, I have never heard him badmouth a student one time.
08:52Okay.
08:53She tells them, we lived a quiet life. Dan had no enemies. They both loved to cook.
08:59And they would take romantic trips, just the two of them.
09:02It was a happy life with her husband. They did that for 25 years.
09:09Nancy's statement doesn't give the cops much to go on as far as who killed Dan.
09:14But they work late into the night looking into Dan's immediate co-workers for possibilities.
09:20We 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. But then
09:42he would usually leave that door open or he didn't really, you know,
09:46he 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. It looked like somebody came in the door
09:56that Daniel Brophy had opened and unlocked and gone through.
10:03We've got so little to go on at this point. It was very much a whodunit.
10:09Realizing that door could have let just about anybody into the building, police pressed the
10:15students 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. It had been parked directly across the street from Oregon Culinary Institute on the side
10:32street. It 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?
10:42His wife, Nancy, wasn't just distraught. She was angry. She confronted the president of the culinary
10:50school and she said, why aren't their cameras displaced?
10:53In this situation, there's two grandmas. There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
11:01I thought that there had to be an explanation. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a
11:07grandmother doing something like this.
11:14Police investigating the mysterious shooting death of culinary instructor Daniel Brophy
11:20hear about a suspicious vehicle spotted racing away from the school.
11:26Initially, we investigated that dark SUV.
11:30We learned that there was a car repair shop directly across the street from Oregon Culinary
11:36Institute on 17th Avenue.
11:40And we learned that the dark SUV was likely workers that were there early in the morning,
11:47shuttling cars back and forth to the dealership.
11:52So there was no information of relevance there.
11:54The only evidence we had of the crime were the two spent 9mm semi-automatic shell casings.
12:03The evidence was small. We did not locate a weapon. And there were no eyewitnesses to the actual
12:12shooting incident. There was an alarm system.
12:15Chef Burphy disabled that alarm at 721 a.m. And a lot of the students were arriving at 730.
12:22That's a short window of time.
12:24Nobody heard a gunfire. Nobody saw anybody running around with a gun.
12:31There weren't any cameras inside the building or outside the building.
12:39So at this point, our law enforcement experience was telling us that this could be forced entry,
12:44a burglary, a robbery, something of that nature.
12:48Darren, myself, other investigators, we all took different quadrants of the building and started
12:54searching for anything out of place.
12:56During the search, one of the interesting things was that Mr. Burphy had his wallet.
13:02The cash and credit cards were all in his wallet. It didn't look like there was a fight.
13:08And there didn't appear to be anything taken from the Culinary Institute.
13:14This seemed very focused on Mr. Burphy.
13:16The evidence is telling police that someone planned this out and intended to shoot Chef
13:25Burphy, hoping they can unmask his killer that cops delve into his past.
13:33Dan Burphy was a preacher's son from North Dakota. From a very young age,
13:37he became enchanted by both the cultures of the West and its food. He wasn't necessarily farm to
13:42table, but he was backyard to table, that's for sure. So Dan had a first marriage that was tumultuous
13:48at best. They had a son together, but Dan left and was not involved with his son's life until
13:53around high school. Nancy Burphy was from the right side of the tracks on Wichita Falls, Texas.
13:59She decided that she was going to become a successful caterer. So she went to culinary school,
14:04and that's where she met Dan. She worked in catering, had a very successful business that
14:10she kind of walked away from, inexplicably, to write romance novels.
14:13Nancy was a romance author and the president of my writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers.
14:22So she's the queen bee. She 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. Very few people in the Rose City Romance
14:36writers were full-time writers. Most of them, like Nancy, were aspiring.
14:45Nancy and Dan did not have children, but Dan had his son, Nathaniel, when he was married to his first
14:52wife. During the initial notification we had with Nancy, it sounded like she really loved Nathaniel as a
15:00son, loved his children. She considered them her grandchildren, and they would have a lot of family
15:06functions and dinners together. Nancy wanted to be the uber-grandma. She would say, let's go on a
15:13family trip to the zoo or the garden. She really wanted to be there to have some fun time with the
15:18little ones. It turned out that Dan and Nancy had actually acted as a caregiving couple to a relative
15:27of Nancy, right? Nancy stepped up and she said, hey, I could take care of a young relative. I'd love it.
15:36The details seemed to paint the picture of Dan and Nancy as happily married grandparents.
15:42So why would someone want Dan dead? You know, we had some more information to try to
15:50obtain 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
16:02up the building. She said that they had bought a gun because of school shootings and she said she
16:10believed it was at the house and that they had never used it ever because they realized that after they
16:15bought it they weren't gun people and so they never did anything with it. And then what we did is we had
16:21two detectives go with her to check on the status of the gun.
16:30When the detectives brought that gun back, it still had the zip ties that are put through the
16:35barrel and slide to make it safe. Never operated, never loaded. That gun was cleared by the crime lab
16:42here 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.
16:53With 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 a half a block up,
17:04we noticed that there were pretty good video cameras on Bellagio's pizza store.
17:08We went in, the manager took us to the back video room and turned the video on.
17:18Cameras were inside the restaurant, but they filmed a perspective that went right through their big front
17:24picture windows. Trying to see if like we see somebody running from the place or whatever.
17:30And so as I'm looking at that, this van drives by. It was a tan gray Toyota minivan.
17:38It looked like somebody trying to leave the scene.
17:43It was right in the beginning of the morning. It was 7 28 a.m.
17:48There's literally a student arriving just a couple minutes after that.
17:52But that's the right time for when we think this incident has occurred.
17:57We 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
18:12Brophy was shot. The question is, who was driving?
18:16It looks exactly like it. And that's what he said. And we all were like, whoa, it looks exactly like it.
18:36We looked at it and we're like, oh, maybe this is off. The timestamp might be off because she just
18:41drove down here. Maybe this is when she first drove down. But we don't see any crime scene tape.
18:46There's no police anywhere.
18:50I mean, the person who you see in the image, it's hard to see. There's a lot of reflective
18:55issues and whatnot. But the person fits Nancy's description generally.
19:05This is something that we need to examine further.
19:08We need to take 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. And so to us, that became a big red flag.
19:33With that video possibly showing Nancy right there at the time of the murder,
19:39detectives 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
19:49detective's. It kind of had a profile that you can make out, a side view profile,
19:55that 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
20:06could see. We're not going to go arrest somebody just based on that. And although I had it in the
20:12back 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.
20:23It's not who fits the mold of a killer.
20:28Since 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. Through that, we were able to
20:43get a feature of the trajectory of the shots through the body. The gunshot to the back was actually
20:50probably the first gunshot because that hit his spine. That would have caused him to fall backwards.
20:58The trajectory of the second bullet to the chest was angular, almost as if somebody had come and
21:10stepped up over his body and shot into his chest. It looked like somebody executed Daniel.
21:20We didn't know who was responsible for this. All we knew is it seemed very personal. It seemed like
21:27somebody went there with vengeance, like they wanted to kill Chef Brophy and that was all they
21:33wanted to do. And they did it in a very tight window of time and were undetected.
21:39Judgeing by how much this shooting looks like the work of a hitman, the cops just have a hard time
21:46believing that Nancy pulled the trigger. We had a hard time wrapping our minds around the elderly
21:53grandmother figure coming in there and executing her husband, center punched in the back and in the
21:58chest like an assassin. Whoever did the shot, shot well. They knew what they were doing when they shot
22:05the handgun and we just couldn't picture that. As the search for the killer goes on, Daniel's family
22:12and friends gathered to say goodbye. The feeling at the vigil was very positive. Everyone knew that
22:24Chef Brophy wouldn't want us to all just be sad that day and instead we talked about all of our
22:29favorite things and our favorite moments with Chef Brophy. I think we all needed that to heal.
22:33We did a spiritual puza and that's my country. How we do, the only thing I can share was
22:45my love. We lost someone who was one of a kind. It was an overwhelming show of support with candles
22:55and roses. His colleagues were there and Nancy Brophy was there too. I stood across from her. I could see how
23:03sad she looked. I thought this is a heartbroken widow. Everyone quickly kind of rallied around to
23:11support her. Nancy's the sweet little grandmother who's lost their spouse to a violent crime. It's
23:18just completely out of the realm of what you might expect. What I came to find out later is that Nancy
23:27wasn't just distraught. She was angry. She confronted the president of the culinary school and she said,
23:32why aren't there cameras this place? Why didn't you have better protection here? If there were some
23:36cameras, we would know who had killed my husband. Nancy was telling people at the vigil who she
23:43thought might be suspects. She talked about Dan's ex-wife who was apparently motivated somehow to get
23:49revenge. That was a piece of background information on the victim that didn't come up when Nancy was
23:55interviewed. In this situation, there's two grandmas. There's the real grandma by blood before he and Nancy
24:05got together. There was some indication that Daniel's ex-wife was hostile.
24:14When we learned about this information, we were like, oh, this is new.
24:19That definitely fueled and motivated us to try to dig that information out where we could.
24:29When 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? I think
24:39that'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,
24:55they find and contact her right away. We eventually got the contact information for Daniel Brophy's
25:02ex-wife, Perla Stillwater, to make sure there wasn't something there. Perla Stillwater was very
25:08cooperative with us and sat and gave us a long interview. We found out that even though things
25:15had been difficult initially during the divorce and after the divorce with Daniel and his ex-wife,
25:21things had been resolved and it wasn't necessarily an issue. There was some healing trying to happen
25:28in regards to what had happened in the past. We didn't uncover really any abuse or mistreatment
25:37between Dan and his ex-wife. They had a decent relationship. I just didn't understand why Nancy
25:43lied about it. Right away I thought, what is going on with this woman? Once they clear Perla Stillwater,
25:54investigators keep looking for new suspects. While we're working on all this information,
26:00Nancy called Darren on the phone. I remember distinctly I was sitting right next to him and
26:06he just seems like shocked by whatever she just said. She's asking me about getting a letter of
26:13clearance that she's not a suspect in the case. And I was like, why would you ask for that? And what
26:20she said was that it was for a small insurance policy and that they needed that so that they could
26:26release funds to her. That's not something the police do. They don't give letters of exoneration.
26:34And she was very jovial in that call. She thought it was funny that she needed this letter to send to her
26:41insurance company. During our interaction with Nancy that first day, she was a grieving elderly widow,
26:48which was the way we viewed her. But now she didn't seem really upset. I would probably say that's when
26:55we're going, she's involved somehow. After this call, the cops decide they better look into the Brophy
27:05family financials. We found out that there were some financial issues with Dan and Nancy. They
27:12weren't making ends meet all that great. We learned that they had not paid their mortgage
27:19several different times over the period of about a year and a half. But we did note that they were
27:24successfully paying all these premiums for the life insurance policies. And when they were added up,
27:30they were extensive. She actually had about $800,000 in life insurance on Dan. And then because Dan
27:39was killed at work, she was going to be entitled to workers comp. That was going to be about another
27:44$400,000. Without that, they were about to be very, very broke in just a couple of months. Things would
27:51have been really bad. When the detective saw all of these overlapping life insurance policies exclusively
27:58taken out on Dan Brophy, they had a motive. She stood to gain quite a bit. But there's only so much
28:06you can do without serving warrants, seizing cell phones and computers, searching the property to find
28:11every piece of evidence. We were confident at this point that we had ruled out any other suspects in
28:17this case based on the investigation. We felt 100% confident that that was Nancy's van that drove
28:24into the area before his death and left the area right after his death. Police changed their tune
28:31about Nancy Brophy. This woman they thought was a grieving granny has quickly become their main suspect
28:39in her husband's murder. We had a lot to learn still. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that this
28:48person who looks like my grandmother could kill. Nancy 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
29:05family members. One of her relatives was in trouble criminally. So Nancy and Dan had started to provide
29:14care for the relative's child for some time frame here in Portland. And at some point Nancy didn't
29:20think that the child should return to that house. And she apparently according to records we found
29:26attempted to keep the child against the parents decision making on this. Nancy had almost somewhat
29:36kidnapped this person for a period of time that was so odd. Ultimately the child went back with
29:44his parents. I 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.
30:09I think she always leaned into the harmless grandmother stereotype or expectation based on her looks.
30:18Unassuming and quiet and humble. But by contrast, the Nancy as president,
30:28she is up front at the podium like a blowhard, like larger than life. And that was a very specific
30:36personality pattern. Nancy Brophy wanted to be a successful romance novelist.
30:43She'd gone and taken classes. She'd learned that the way to be a successful romance novelist is to
30:47write a series of novels and give the first one for free and make them buy the rest. So she published
30:52under her own name and she self-published those books. It was a big dream but she was never successful.
30:57She was making 10 or 20 bucks off these books. I 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.
31:17The 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
31:27them in order to be able to fund going to some of these writing events and conventions.
31:32We started to find out Nancy was a romance novelist. People started contacting us because Nancy had
31:41written a writer's blog and it was how to murder your husband.
31:50They talked about how you go to the person's work site, make sure there's no video cameras,
31:54you do these things. And it was just kind of this theme of a woman character
31:59solving her problem by getting rid of a male in her life that was causing all her problems.
32:05It was clickbait. It was deliberately sensational. But if you read the comments,
32:11it's really quite disturbing. One 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.
32:26I think that a question that we always wanted to understand was Nancy using her books as a trial
32:35ground for ultimately acting out that process of shooting your husband, getting away with it,
32:44riding off into the sunset to do the things you wanted to do in life.
32:48She had written that article back in 2011, but nonetheless, it made us curious about her writing.
32:53It was apparent that she had knowledge of firearms, police procedures,
33:01and how somebody might carry out a murder.
33:08With money as a motive and Nancy's writing more than a little suspicious,
33:13the DA gives police the okay to have a team watch Nancy's movements.
33:18The idea was that detectives were going to be out on scene so they could monitor where she was,
33:25because we kind of thought that maybe she had wind that we were onto her. So I walked over to the
33:32Portland Police Bureau. We get upstairs and we're informed that there was some miscommunication on
33:39scene and she had been arrested. Whoops! They jumped the gun with the arrest. Without the right evidence,
33:50the entire case could fall apart.
33:54It was a chaotic moment because Nancy was arrested too soon. It starts this countdown clock because
34:00suddenly they need to go and show a grand jury that they have proof, which they weren't quite ready to do.
34:17Nancy was transported back to the detective division. Darren and I attempted to interview her.
34:22We know that you're involved with your husband's death. The information is clear. It shows your vehicle. It even
34:31captures your license plate. Before you are asked any questions, you must understand your rights.
34:36Since I understand those rights, then I have a lawyer. Okay.
34:39She invoked and asked for an attorney very quickly.
34:44Nancy didn't ask for an explanation about why she was being arrested. Her response was,
34:50oh, you must think I killed my husband. And it surprised me just because of the lack of emotion
34:54that this person was showing. The clock is ticking and the cops have to scramble to gather enough
35:02evidence to make their case. We went to the house to execute the search warrant. We found various life
35:08insurance policy documentation that we collected. We also found documentation of a storage unit that she
35:15had purchased. We conducted a search warrant on that storage unit. And during that search, a box was
35:24located that was marked scarves, purses, and GK. And when they opened that, it was an unbuilt ghost gun.
35:35A ghost gun is an 80% built firearm. You could buy online. It's unserialized. It's unregistered. And
35:45once you buy it and it arrives, you have to do a couple of things to it in order for it to be an
35:51operable firearm. We realized the gun's never been put together. But she never told us about this gun.
35:58Why would you have a ghost gun, especially that kind of gun that's unserialized with law enforcement?
36:05So we started developing a running theory once we found that gun, that that must have been her plan,
36:11was to buy a ghost gun. She could commit the murder with it. She could drop it in one of our many bodies
36:16of water. And nobody would be the wiser and we'll never find it. But once she realized that she couldn't
36:23build it, she had to come up with another plan. And 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
36:41to see what else she's hiding. Come to find out, Nancy buys a full-size Glock
36:49handgun at a gun show. And then she was on eBay and she had purchased the slide and the barrel assemblies
36:59that fit onto a Glock handgun. That gun that she bought at the gun show turned out to be the gun that
37:07she had handed over to police on the day of the murder. So knowing that that gun was not the murder
37:14weapon, we started thinking, well, maybe she swapped the slide and barrel. Once police had that, if they
37:21tested it, it would not be a match and would take us off the trail that she possibly did this. Despite
37:28continuous searching, searching of sewers, searching of garbage cans, we were never able to find the slide
37:35barrel that she bought on eBay. Unfortunately, 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.
37:54We knew this van fit with the description of Nancy's van. So we started working really hard on the video.
38:01We played with it over and over, trying to grab that one image. We were able to actually read numbers
38:08and letters off the license plate. And we were able to run reports with DMV. The only one with that
38:19partial plate, make, model and color, came back to their van, the Brophy van. And that video also
38:27provided for us a really good window of time when she first arrived in the van. It was 7 0 8 AM.
38:35That morning, Dan had put in his pin to disarm the alarm. And he did that at 7 21 AM.
38:43We have the video that shows the van leaving at 7 28. And we know the next instructor arrived shortly
38:51after 7 30. So we did have a nice tight window that we could focus on. We believe that she had parked
38:58somewhere in that back block where there's no video and saw him park, saw him leave the door open
39:06and went in and did what she did.
39:08That made us feel pretty strong about our case.
39:16With all the evidence he needs, the DA proves to the grand jury that this case is ready to move to trial.
39:27Nancy's trial is delayed for many years. COVID hits and the courthouses shut down. So she sits in jail
39:38for four long years from 2018 to 2022.
39:49I was very confident that we were going to convict Nancy as long as our evidence came in the way that
39:56we anticipated it. We wanted an older jury. We thought a young juror would walk in the courtroom,
40:05look at her. She's going to be dressed in nice clothing. She always had a nice scarf on every day.
40:11And they're going to see their own grandmother and not ever be able to convict their own grandmother.
40:18The defense pushed really hard on our theory of the case. She tried to explain
40:28what she was doing that morning and why she would have lied about it because it just came across so
40:34insincere. This was a very tough trial for Dan's family. Dan's son, Dan's mother and father were all
40:43there. They were trying to see justice done for the person who had killed their son. And they're
40:49seeing this person deny it all. It didn't make any sense. So I said, isn't it possible? What really
40:57drove 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.
41:16This is broke if you can rise. The jury came back with the correct verdict of guilty
41:21for 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.
41:43I wish that he could have continued to teach. He left a great impact on many people that love him still.
41:50Something I personally struggled with was, how did we even get here? How does this even happen?
42:07It's hard to believe Nancy Brophy, this elderly lady we just sat with and cried with,
42:12that she could have come there and killed him.
42:14Not what you picture in your head when you think grandmother.
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