A novelist accused of murdering her husband previously wrote a 700-word essay titled “How to Murder Your Husband.”
According to The Oregonian, Nancy Crampton Brophy was booked last week in the Multnomah County Detention Center after police said she fatally shot her husband of 27 years, Daniel Brophy. He was found dead on June 2 in the kitchen of the Oregon Culinary Institute.
According to The Washington Post, she was arrested on Sept. 5 on murder charges and using an unlawful weapon. She has not filed a plea.
Her essay, which is no longer public, was published on the website See Jane Publish on Nov. 4, 2011, in which she chronicled several motives for women killing their husbands like infidelity and greed, although police and prosecutors haven’t pinpointed a possible motive for Brophy herself.
“Divorce is expensive, and do you really want to split your possessions?” she wrote in her blog post, according to The Oregonian.
According to The Washington Post, the blog also featured a number of murder weapons she would choose and advised against hiring a hit man or a lover to do the job. She also said to never use poison because it is detectable.
“I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them. I don’t want to worry about blood and brains splattered on my walls. And really, I’m not good at remembering lies,” she wrote. “But the thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough.”
She added, “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… After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail.”
In her 2015 novel “The Wrong Husband,” Brophy wrote about a woman who escaped from her spouse by faking her own death after a shipwreck and later fell for one of the men sent to find her.