Author Who Published Essay Called ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Has Been Charged with Murdering Her Husband

Portland-based romance novelist Nancy Crampton Brophy has a history of writing about troubled relationships. Her books often centre around turbulent relationships and one of her novels, called The Wrong Cop, follows a woman who fantasizes about killing her husband,. while another novel, called The Wrong Husband, features a woman faking her own death in order to be free of her abusive husband.

As The Washington Post reports, in 2011, Crampton Brophy published a blog on See Jane Publish called How to Murder Your Husband, which saw the author write about the motives and weapons she might use were she to write a novel about a woman killing her husband. The post has since been made private, advised against hiring a hit-man, as they will often rat you out, and also stated poison isn’t a good idea as you don’t want to have to be around a sick lover.

“After all,” she wrote, “if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail.”

Crampton-Brophy has since been arrested by police following the death of her husband, Daniel Brophy, who was shot to death at his workplace at the Oregon Culinary Institute on June 2. Following her husband’s death, Crampton-Brophy wrote an emotional post on Facebook.

“For my Facebook friends and family, I have sad news to relate,” Crampton-Brophy wrote. “My husband and best friend, Chef Dan Brophy was killed yesterday morning. For those of you who are close to me and feel this deserved a phone call, you are right, but I’m struggling to make sense of this right now.”

Her husband worked as a chef at the Oregon Culinary Institute, where he was known as the “resident encyclopaedia of knowledge” who had a “creative approach to teaching” and an “offbeat sense of humor,” according to his memoriam. Following his death, hundreds of mourners held a candlelight vigil outside his workplace.

Crampton-Brophy was brought before a judge on Thursday to hear the charges against her. A spokesman for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office told The Washington Post that the judge took the extra step of sealing a probable cause affidavit in Crampton Brophy’s case, per the prosecutors’ request.

“It’s a big shock. It’s a big shock,” Brophy’s mother, Karen Brophy, told The Post following her daughter-in-law’s arrest. “But we’re not making any statements.”

The pair had been married for 27 years and Crampton-Brophy would occasionally write about their marriage on her website. She stated their marriage had its ups and downs but there were “more good times than bad”.

She often wrote in a humorous way about their relationship In a post on See Jane Publish, she wrote: “My husband and I are both on our second (and final — trust me!) marriage. We vowed, prior to saying ‘I do,’ that we would not end in divorce. We did not, I should note, rule out a tragic drive-by shooting or a suspicious accident.”

She finished by saying she loved “the way he can make me laugh when I’m really angry,” and “how, when I least expect it, he can say the perfect thing.”

“But one last word of caution,” she added, “if I ever take a swan-dive off a high building, investigate. Investigate. Investigate.”