Nancy Crampton Brophy’s books and writings were all about abusive husbands and women who wanted to murder them.
Someone probably should have asked her if her own marriage was okay.
The Washington Post reported that in one of her romance novels, “The Wrong Cop,” a woman “spent every day of her marriage fantasizing about killing” her husband. In the eerily titled essay “How to Murder Your Husband,” Crampton Brophy wrote about, well, how to get away with murdering your husband. And in a “See Jane Publish” blog post in 2011, she suggested motives and murder weapons for her characters to kill their husbands (in a fiction novel, of course). She wrote that hiring a hit man was a bad idea, because they might “rat you out to the police,” and ruled out poison because it was traceable.
On Sept. 5, Crampton Brophy was arrested and charged with the June 2 murder of her husband, Daniel, a beloved chef who taught at the Oregon Culinary Institute. His students found his body in the kitchen. She allegedly shot him, but as the Post notes, police don’t yet have a motive.
After his murder, Crampton Brophy wrote on Facebook that she was “struggling to make sense of this right now.”
Maybe it’s in her writing.