Wondery subscribers can binge all episodes of happily never after. Dan and Nancy early and ad free. Join wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Carolyn Zane dragged her suitcase across the lobby of a Marriott in San Antonio, Texas. People were buzzing around the room. Writers, publishers, agents. It was the summer of 2014, and Carolyn was attending a writing conference with a few pals from the Rose City romance writers, including Nancy Brophy.

You can cut costs by sharing a room with some of your good friends, and really, it's a week long slumber party. It is so fun bunking with four.

Other women in a small hotel room. You get really comfortable.

You know, you're living with somebody for an entire week, and so you kind of get to see another side of them a little bit, a lot more of them.

When they weren't attending writing panels or networking, they spent time together, huddled around mirrors, getting ready in the morning or just hanging out at the end of the day. And Nancy, as usual, ruled the roost.

She was noisy, and she was sort of the head cheerleader, party coordinator, the cruise director, whatever you want to say. She had a big personality. And so, you know, a lot of the conversation revolved around things Nancy was interested in.

But Carolyn also saw other unexpected sides of Nancy.

She would prance out of the bathroom au natural, you know, like in her birthday suit, flounce down on the bed and sit there for a while. I've never been that uninhibited. So in a way, I kind of admire somebody who can, you know, really be that free.

Carolyn also discovered one of Nancy's hidden talents.

Nancy's big into tarot cards. And she'd break out her cards and spread them out on the bed. And then, you know, the different writers who wanted to see if they were going to be rich and famous would come, and she would do their reading.

Carolyn never got a reading from Nancy. She wasn't really into tarot cards. But four years later, when Nancy was arrested for murdering her husband, one of the images that came back to Carolyn was Nancy sitting on that bed with the tarot cards spread out in front of her.

And I always thought it was kind of ironic that her cards never told her what was happening in her own future.

During the course of this series, I've spent a lot of time thinking about certain questions, like what happened to that life of the party? Nancy we all knew, and what does this story tell us about the line between imagination and reality? I sent a letter to Nancy in prison to try to get some more answers. I asked if I could visit her at Coffee Creek, where she's serving a life sentence, I wrote, I'm doing my best to tell your story, but it seems like anything we'd create wouldn't be complete without your point of view. I never got a response from her.

I.

But in this special episode, I've got a few guests who can give us some answers to those questions. First is Carolyn Zane, a former member of the Rose City romance writers who attended that writing conference with Nancy? She joined several years before either Nancy or I did and heard some of Nancy's ideas before they ever became novels. Someone else who's read a lot of Nancy's books, but for entirely different reasons, is Zane Sparling, the reporter on this series. Zane was also present in the courtroom throughout Nancy's trial. I'll be chatting with Carolyn and Zane about Nancy and her writing and why some of Nancy's friends still remain loyal to her. Later, I'll be speaking with Doctor Kirk Honda. Doctor Honda is a therapist and professor who specializes in personality disorders. He'll walk us through some of the major moments in this story and help us answer the biggest, biggest question of the series. What drove Nancy to murder her husband? From wondery and the Oregonian, I'm Heidi Trethewey, and this is a special episode of happily never after. Dan and Nancy, crazy, crazy for love. I'm excited to speak with two people who know way more than I do about Nancy and this story.

Carolyn Zane was a member of Nancy's writing group, and Zane Sparling is the reporter of this series. It's so great to have you both.

We're both Zanes. Yes, we are. Yeah. Good to see you, too, again, Doug. Good name.

I agree.

So, Carolyn, you're one of the very few friends from Nancy's writing group who agreed to speak to Zane for the podcast. Why were you willing to come forward?

At first, I was reticent because we all are intertwined. This is a small world of romance writers. It's very, very professional. A lot of really terrific, wonderful resources out there. And Nancy was very popular in our local chapter, and she had a lot of clout in our chapter. You know, she was president at one point. And I think, really, when you have so many people who are your friends and they're rooting for her, even if you're not on the same page they are, you're reticent to just throw her under the bus because what if she is innocent and you've got a career that you're thinking about? And so, yeah, you don't want to offend. You, don't want to burn bridges. And even if it seemed clear to me, you know, especially during the trial, that she was guilty, I didn't want to presuppose. I think. And, Zane, I'll tell you why people talk to you. You keep asking. I said no.

Good job.

Yeah, I said no a bunch of times. You were persistent.

And Carolyn, Carolyn, to your credit, you were willing to suss me out and give me a chance. And we had a very informal chat at a coffee house. I was glad you gave me that opportunity, and I think it certainly has helped tell this story.

Yeah, it certainly did. And aside from getting people to speak to you for the podcast, Zane, I know you also had the task of reading pretty much all of Nancy's books for your reporting. Tell us what that experience was like.

One thing you won't know if you've never read any of Nancy's books in print is that they don't have page numbers, so you can never refer back to which page. It's just one of the miracles of self publishing is. I think she forgot to include page numbers.

Oh, my goodness.

Which makes citations difficult. Nancy Brophy is a competent, adequate person in the sense that she completed these books. They have a beginning, middle, and end. The characters don't change names or suddenly become transmogrified into space aliens halfway through. There is some form of internal logic that concludes the narrative. Despite numerous implausibilities, as a stylist, I would not say she is going down the annals of time. I think that she certainly has a style. It's somewhat cliche, as we've said. And then when she breaks out of cliche, it's slightly horrifying.

Is that why Nancy wasn't a successful writer?

Personally, I think that her plots were convoluted. I don't think that always there was a clear thread. You need to stick to the framework. And Nancy tends to. Even at the trial, she said, I veer off on rabbit trails. Well, in your writing, you do too. You tend to rabbit hole. Yeah, exactly. So there is definitely a framework. If you're going to please the reader, you have to stick to the framework.

Let's shift gears for a moment to when Nancy was first arrested, this was someone you'd known for years and even shared a room with. What was going through your mind?

Well, from the minute I found out Dan was murdered, I felt horrible for Nancy. We all did. We were just brokenhearted for her. Then when they called her the perp, as you can tell right now, words are failing me. I mean, here is this grandmotherly, funny, gregarious, boisterous dingbat who murder? Really, it just didn't seem possible.

So at what point did you go from, Nancy couldn't have done this to, she's guilty?

I think one thing that really stood out to me is she told the police, I don't care who did this. I just want my husband back. And I'm like, what?

Yes.

Yeah. If someone shot my husband in cold blood, I'd want the police to hunt that killer down and make him Bob for french fries at McDonald's before they blew him away by firing squad. You know, but also, the amnesia thing really got to me after a while. I mean, you know, you watch enough of these true crime shows, you know, 48 hours and forensic files and this kind of stuff, and it's really amazing how the spouse totally gets amnesia about the time that their spouse was being murdered. You know, I can't remember a thing, and I just find that really suspect. It doesn't work as a plot device in most novels. Most people don't buy it. Why would it work in your defense for a murder trial? So I think she absolutely remembers everything, and she's. If she thinks she doesn't remember, it's something she's talked herself into. But she remembers. She knows she was there.

Why do you think that evidence convinced you, but not some of Nancy's other friends?

Because they were closer to her than I was. I was always a friend of a friend of Nancy's. You know, we didn't socialize a whole lot. And when we did socialize, it was somebody else had organized the get together, not me. So we didn't really seek each other out as, you know, one on one buddies for a lunch date or anything like that. But we did run in the same crowd. We had a lot of the same friends. And when it came to Nancy, if my friends thought she was great, then okay. And, you know, she was vetted as far as I was concerned. And, you know, on the surface, Nancy is very likable. She is a likable villain.

I get what you mean. Likable villain. One thing that struck me while we were working on this story and that I found really chilling, Nancy wrote in her blog, as I piece my stories together, my characters are creating me as much as I am creating them. With their help, I am becoming the person I always wanted to be. And when I put that in context of her multiple books in which a woman is in a marriage to a bad husband, she shoots him, gets away with it, and then rides off into the sunset with a navy seal. I'm wondering, is this the person you want to be? Are you seeing yourself truly in the character, rather than seeing the character as someone different from you? Do you think Nancy was confusing fiction with reality?

I think that the more Nancy kind of soaked her brain in this world where women could Lara Croft their way into situations where they blew men away and then live, like you said, live happily ever after, I think that that sort of changes something in your brain. You start buying into it, you start believing it. I think the research was teaching her that she was very smart, maybe smarter than the police. And I think her research very much probably was morphed into the idea that maybe I, my heroines have certainly gotten away with it book after book. Maybe I can, too.

So I'm just going to come right out and ask, why do you think Nancy killed her husband? And Zane, let's start with you.

Well, like Carolyn was saying earlier, I think she had a naivete about her. She had done some research into police procedures, a citizen academy with the sheriff's office. We think she probably had done some sort of a writer based lecture or designated for writers from a former CSI type person. That being said, she had this just magical thinking that allowed her to believe that this would be easy to get away with, that somehow no cameras would see her coming or going, that suspicion would never fall on her, that the detectives in this case would do some cursory investigation, chalk it up as a random homeless person who just decided to break in, steal nothing, and kill someone for no reason, and then just close the case and it would gather dust in some file cabinet. She probably didn't consider how long she would have to act as a grieving widow. I mean, we know that she, of course, tries to sell the house and move out and get out of town as fast as possible. But even then, it was a months and months long performance that must have been for her, knowing the truth.

Quite a strain, to say the least. I think that she did it at the end of the day, for the freedom. She wanted to move to Portugal. We know that one of her friends now lives in Portugal. That friend did not wish to speak with us for the podcast, but she wanted to escape, have this new life as an expat. And I think, of course, she wanted the success. And whether she really believed that there was a rock solid six pack navy seal in her future, she certainly had grown tired of Dan. We know that they probably weren't sleeping in the same bedroom, there was a lot of evidence that Dan now slept in a living room or a home office. Unfortunately, we've talked so much about what Nancy might have been thinking, and of course, we'll never know what Dan was thinking because he can't tell us. So we'll never know Dan's perspective. And I hope that doesn't get lost, that as much as we can wonder about what Nancy may have been thinking. Dan is the one who has been truly silenced. Nancy is hiding because she's ashamed of the truth. But Dan has no ability to tell his story.

And I think that's why we wanted to make this podcast.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was really important for us to paint a full picture of who Dan was in this story. He was a mentor, a teacher, a loving father and son. And I love that he was really passionate about cooking and teaching and the environment, and he truly cared about giving back to his community. You know, another part of that picture was that everyone said Dan and Nancy were in love. Carolyn, you spent time with both of them. What did you know about their relationship?

Well, I can speak to the why Dan was sleeping in a separate room.

Was it the snoring?

It was.

Oh, my word. You know, I have never been privy to such vigorous noise. I was thinking that they were gonna call from the lobby and tell us to knock it off in our room.

And this is when you were actually sharing a hotel room with Nancy and you were hearing her doing the snoring?

Yes.

Is that right?

It was tough to get to sleep. Yeah, it really was. She was, you know, I feel sorry for the other prisoners. You know, they have nowhere to go. They can't get away.

I have one last question for you, Carolyn. As writers, we craft stories in the language of wants and needs. So if the character wants something, theyre going to fight through huge obstacles, put their life on the line, go for what they want. But when they finally get the thing they want, then they discover theres something deeper that they actually needed in order to grow and become better people. Right. So thats the point where our books turn and take you into the dark night of the soul. So if we play this out in Nancys own life, what do you think it was that Nancy wanted versus what she actually needed?

Oh, that's an excellent question. And, you know, not being able to hop inside her brain and her heart, we're going to have to speculate. I think Nancy wanted fame. And the most ironic thing of all is she is hands down the most famous person in romance writers. Of America. I mean, well, true. Our local chapter. Let's put a caveat on our local chapter. I mean, we've got Nora Roberts and a lot of people out there who are, you know, super uber famous and, you know, but it's ironic that she found that kind of fame. So I think that's what she wanted. Sadly, I think that's what she got. Infamy more than fame.

Well, Carolyn and Zane, thank you so much for joining me.

Good to see you again, Zane and Heidi. It has been just lovely getting to know you.

Same.

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Well, I'm excited to chat with our next guest, Doctor Kirk Honda. Doctor Honda is a therapist, professor and the host of the podcast psychology in Seattle, where he analyzes true crime stories through a psychological lens. Hi, Doctor Honda. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

So I'm wondering if you can help us understand Nancy more. A lot of people in this series described her as attention seeking, a narcissist, or thought she was the smartest person in the room. What is narcissistic personality disorder and how does someone become a narcissist?

The common theory as to why people develop narcissistic personality disorder is that when a young child, zero to five, is being mistreated in a way that the child believes that they are inferior, they are forced to develop some defense against that, and it has to be pretty robust as a defense structure. One of the defensive structures available to children is what we call narcissistic personality, in which the individual overcompensates for their deep sense of inferiority by convincing themselves and other people constantly that they are not only worthy, but they are superior. When these individuals, if they don't get enough treatment or corrective experiences in childhood or as an adolescent, they'll emerge into adulthood with a set of behaviors that we call narcissistic personality. They're constantly running from the deep, deep emotional pain of being rejected and inferior, and all of their efforts only mask what's happening. It doesn't actually fix it. It actually perpetuates it by pushing other people away and making them feel additionally inferior.

So if she had narcissistic personality disorder, could that help us understand why she decided to testify. I mean, she didn't have to, and it might have been better for her if she hadn't.

Yeah, this is something that happens a lot in studying other individuals like this. It's really hard for them to sit at the defendant table and not chime in. In fact, a lot of people with narcissistic personality disorder, whether they testify or nothing, they will have to indicate something while they're sitting in that chair. Even though their attorney is saying, don't laugh, don't smile, don't scoff, don't grumble, just sit there with an open face and come across as a likable person to the jury.

Yeah, if I have my lawyer hat on, I would be begging Nancy, be humble, be humble, be humble.

But people with narcissistic personality disorder, it's really hard for them not to chime in. Another factor is that they believe that their thoughts are better than others. It's a distortion that they resort to as a way of counteracting the deep inferiority that they feel on a constant basis. And so they just have this conscious distortion that if you just let me talk, I'll convince everybody. It's another reason why people with narcissistic personality disorder will often defend themselves in court, because they believe they know more than lawyers know, and this often will shoot them in the foot.

Let's talk about the retrograde amnesia. This was Nancy's main defense strategy. What's your take on that, Doctor Honda?

Yeah. So retrograde amnesia happens if it's brain injury, like a stroke or something, or if someone has Alzheimer's. A typical story with someone with this kind of memory loss is that they will remember bits and pieces. It would be strange that it would just completely erase a number of hours of that morning. The other thing is that during the trial, I heard three different defenses that she used. She said the retrograde amnesia. She also said that the morning was mundane and therefore forgettable, but it was the morning that her husband died, so it would automatically not be mundane. She also said that.

She said she was driving around writing.

On cross examinations, that she will often drive around in a dissociative state on autopilot. So how does she know those two other things if she has a complete memory loss? What she say? Memory hole.

Memory hole.

So it's not very convincing to a jury because it sounds like desperately machine gunning as many different things you could possibly say to throw people off the scent. And to me, I mean, I don't want to give anyone ideas. But a much better defense would have been something like where she says, look, when I learned about my husband dying, I was traumatized naturally. And I didn't know it at the time, but I was in a state of shock. And when the investigator asked me what I did that morning, I actually couldn't really remember. So I just took a guess, I think. And I said that I was at home taking a shower later that day or the next day. I thought about it some more, and I remembered, no, no, no. I was actually downtown, and I picked up the phone to call the investigator. And then I thought, but this could implicate me, so I'm just gonna not say it because it's not really relevant anyway. And I want them to focus on finding the killer. If she had said something like that to me as a jury member, you know that beyond a reasonable doubt, that would, I think, be convinced.

Because the whole case, to me, revolved around these details. The car driving by, the school.

I'm so impressed. You would have been a very good.

Lawyer or a good murderer.

Oh, yikes. Well, on that note, I want to talk about Nancy's writing. In writing groups, we often refer to writing from your id, leaning into the stuff that just you're naturally attracted to. And so while Nancy could have written ghost stories or amish romances or teenage vampire stories, she chose romantic suspense. And specifically, she chose to write about women who were in unhappy marriages with bad men who shot their husbands and were able to then get away with it and ride off into the sunset with a sexy navy SeaL and his chisel dabs. That was the fantasy that we saw over and over and over again in Nancy's books.

Yeah, it's a tempting fantasy that might have helped her to cope with life. It's also strange that for people with narcissism, they internally are desperate for closeness. But they have a very conflicted relationship with that urge because of their early childhood experiences of being neglected, possibly abused, such that even if their relationship is going well, they might have an urge to annihilate or break up or distance themselves from that attachment figure because they're terrified of being vulnerable. And so it seems likely that there were invitations and movements towards vulnerability for her. And as that happened, she had the commensurate fantasy and coping, internal fantasy and thoughts about taking him out. It's also just another possibility. And I think people speculate about this, that her own fantasy world that she would go into when she would write might have contributed to her actually doing it. Because for the narcissistic person. They believe that their thoughts are superior and wonderful. And as she's writing, she's coming up with these ways in which her protagonist can get away with the murder. Right. And she controls all the factors. She controls the police, she controls the evidence. She controls everything.

And so she can control the circumstances. To have the protagonist get away with it, it might have contributed to her believing even further that she could control the real world in a way that she could get away with it.

Well, obviously, Nancy still hasn't confessed and will probably never hear in her own words why she did it. But based on what you've learned about this case, why do you think she might have done it, or what are possible explanations?

I've given this a lot of thought, and, of course, it's all speculative, but I think it's possible that her whole life she had been chasing fame and fortune and prestige. And if we had all the data, I'm guessing we would see a pattern, since she was a teenager, of chasing this. Then she meets Dan, who is a chef, and it sounds very fancy, and she is initially attracted to him because he is a ticket to that fame and fortune and prestige. As she gets to know him, and shes committed to the relationship, she finds out that hes not really interested in that. He happens to be a chef, but he's actually much more of a grassroots kind of a guy, and that isn't working out for her. So she leans into her career as an author. She really wants that to work out. She's convinced that it will. That's another thing about narcissism, is that the individual will convince themselves of the distortion, and there's almost nothing you can do to convince them otherwise. There has to be a critical mass of data to push him off of it, which I think happened within those last couple years.

And so she, I think, developed another fantasy. For some reason, it's hard to know what the seed of this would be, but Portugal was this the next fantasy of prestige and fortune and fame and being able to show off, and it also would erase her life that she was living. It would just wipe the slate clean. And so she needed it to happen. It became more of a desperation, and she started to try to convince Dan to do it with her, and he didn't want to do it or didn't want to do it on our timeline. And the desperation was mounting. She's getting older, and this is the one chance, and he was in the way. And I think that wrapped up in her own writing and fantasizing about all the time living in that world. I think it all culminated in her killing him.

I was asked this question during an interview for this show and I thought it was a really good one. And I'm curious about what you think. Do you think Nancy would have killed her husband if she had been successful as an author?

I, of course, can't know, but my speculation is that she would not have killed him if she were successful because she would be getting that need met so that she could convince herself that she's a worthy human being.

Doctor Honda, this was all so interesting. Thank you so much for your insight and for helping us to understand Nancy a bit better.

Thank you. And thank you for introducing me to this case. It's been really interesting to look into.

If you like haply never after Dan and Nancy, you can binge all episodes ad free right now by joining Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondery.com. survey from Wondery and the Oregonian this is a special episode of happily never after Dan and Nancy. This episode is hosted by me, Heidi Trethewey. Reporter is Zane Sparling. Additional editing by Margaret Haberman. Senior producer is Tracy Egbert. Senior story editor is Natalie Shisha. Associate producer is Sam Hobson. Sound design by Jay Rothman. Sound supervisor is Marcelino Villpondo. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez. For free song sync Fact Checking by Annika Robbins senior managing producer is Latta Pandya. Managing producer is Heather Baloga. Executive producer producers for advanced local are Richard diamond and Selena Roberts. Executive producers are Nidori Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louie, and Jen Sargent. For Wonderye.