Post-traumatic amnesia, gun barrel bought on eBay but now untraceable, multiple death insurances: did a 71-year-old American novelist accused of having deleted her husband really dare to commit her crime as in the books?
Nancy Crampton Brophy’s trial opened in early April in a court in Portland, Oregon (northwestern United States). But it was not until this week that the writer, who specializes in sentimental novels with titles as evocative as hell at heart Where the bad husbandor questioned at the bar by the prosecution, who put her in front of her multiple contradictions.
The novelist, who notably wrote an essay entitled… how to kill her husbanddevoted to the art and the manner of getting rid of a spouse without being worried by justice, however has the answer to everything and denies it altogether.
The accused grilled
Investigators say Nancy Crampton Brophy killed her then-63-year-old chef husband Daniel in June 2018 to pocket payouts from ten insurance policies totaling $1.4 million. Despite their heavy debts, the couple paid more than a thousand dollars in premiums each month but did not repay their mortgage, the prosecution pointed out.
Prosecutor Shawn Overstreet slammed Nancy Crampton Brophy, daring her to explain why a surveillance camera filmed her vehicle outside the cooking school where her husband officiated, just minutes before he was shot two bullets in a classroom.
The defendant and a psychologist called by the defense retorted that she had forgotten this sequence due to amnesia caused by a shock: the news of the death of her husband.
“If I had killed him…”
How can the novelist be certain that she did not kill her husband before forgetting him for the same reasons? Asked the prosecutor. You were there at the same time someone shot your husband dead, within six minutes, with the exact type of weapon you own that is now mysteriously missing.
launched the prosecutor, quoted by the newspaper The Oregonian.
I feel like if I killed him, I’d know all the details
replied Nancy Crampton Brophy, believing that she was in the neighborhood by pure coincidence, no doubt to find inspiration for her works there.
And this Glock pistol barrel purchased on eBay a few months earlier, which for the police was mounted by the accused on the body of a firearm of the same model owned by the couple to serve as the murder weapon, a barrel never found despite intensive searches?
The novelist assures that she had bought this spare part for the sake of realism, as an accessory for writing a book, and that she has not the slightest idea of what it could have become.
As for the Glock pistol, she had acquired it so that her husband could protect himself when he went mushroom picking in the woods, she had previously said. No date has been set for the end of the trial.