Wndyri Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy, early and ad-free. Join WNDYRI Plus in the WNDYRI app or on Apple podcasts. Sean Overstreet looked like he could have stepped off of one of Nancy's novel covers. He was broad-shouldered, with dark blonde hair and a square jawline. If Nancy ever wrote the wrong lawyer, he'd be perfect for it. And that's the role he wanted, the district attorney who got Nancy locked away. She refused to take a plea deal or talk to the detectives. But that didn't mean Nancy wasn't talking. Since she'd been arrested, she'd had a steady stream of visitors and phone calls.

Nancy was just very, very social.

And once a month, an investigator dropped off a compilation of Nancy's calls for Sean to listen to.

Let me tell you about the meals here. 25 years with dad did not help me. So nothing is hot. So when they serve you oatmeal or they serve you cream of wheat, it's already developed that little skim over the top.

If you didn't know that they were jail calls, you wouldn't suspect that she's making them from jail while being held for murder.

We're playing Scrabble here with some of the most interesting words you've ever seen in your entire life. I keep saying, What is this word? What is this word? And it's very optional.

I listen to a lot of jail calls, and not everybody talks about their case, but they're depressed or they're upset or they're sad about their situation. They miss their family and friends, and they feel bad about is happening and the position that they're in.

I got a fan letter, and they sent me this, Oh, a great artist like you should not be incarcerated, blah, blah, blah. What do you need? What can I send you? I'll send you all the time of details about myself, and you don't want to say, Really, don't. I'm okay. This is the fun I'm having.

We started thinking, Does she have some mental illness? I mean, is there something wrong here? She doesn't I think that she's going to actually be held responsible for this. She thought she was smarter than everybody, and she thought she can get away with it.

So Saturday night, we all got strict searched and our wrist got caught. And I got in trouble for too many books. I said, Oh, I suppose that's not the worst thing I could be in trouble for. He said, Yeah, you could be in trouble for murder. Oh, wait.

What podcasts are you in the mood for? Award-winning? What about Edge of your Seat readers? Interested in a thought-provoking mystery? Or perhaps something that'll teach you more about the world around us. Either way, WNDY Plus has you covered with ad-free episodes of your favorite podcasts and number one hits. Join WNDY Plus in the WNDY app or on Apple podcasts. If you're looking for a deeper dive into Nancy Brophy's story, you should check out retired FBI agent and criminal profiler, Candice DeLong's coverage of the case in the latest episode of Killer Psychie. Stay tuned until the end of this episode to hear a preview of Killer their psyche. From WNDYRI and the Oregonian, I'm Heidi Treffaway.

If they ask me, I could write a book.

And this is Happily Family Never After, Dan and Nancy. And the simple secret of the flower. This is episode 5, Stranger Than Fiction. Detective Posey's search through Nancy's Internet history had turned up some interesting results. Now, writers joke about their browsing all the time. Like, If you see my search history, I'm going down for murder. My writer friends researching bombs and witchcraft and international espionage, Nancy had been doing a lot of searching about guns.

You know, as far as how to manipulate them and use them.

Starting in late 2017, Nancy became especially interested in one particular gun, the unregistered, untraceable kind, ghost guns. She finally bought one on Christmas Eve, a little stalking stuffer for herself.

Can you speak with Mr. Dove, please?

The detectives found the name of Kermit Dove, a local gunsmith, in Nancy's search history. Mr.

Dove, this is Detective Anthony Merrill with Portland Police Bureau Homicide detail.

It wasn't hard for Kermit to remember Nancy. She'd called him to ask about building a gun from a kit. She wanted to know if she got stuck, could she get help from a professional like me? Kermit told her no. He could lose his license for helping someone build an unregistered weapon. I have had several calls from people like that, but I remember this particular one because I don't have many emails calling me about building guns, serialized or unsterilized. Kermit couldn't give Merrill much information about that gun kit. But what what Kermit did tell them helped them piece together what had likely happened in the months leading up to Dan's murder. Christmas Eve of 2017, Nancy purchases a gun kit online.

Maybe she thought the Ghost Gun was going to be the perfect weapon because it was untraceable. But then when she opened it up and realized all the work that went into putting this thing together, maybe it was beyond her capability.

Then she reaches out to a gunsmith and learns she's on her own with it. So that February, she changes course and buys a licensed gun at a local gun show.

The theory is she came up with a plan to buy a gun that would be all legit, that there would be paperwork showing her purchase of it. She had a reason because there were school shootings and Dan worked in the school.

Then, on the day of the murder, Nancy freely hands over that licensed gun to the police. She tells Meryl and Posey that she and Dan had bought it but never used it.

They got it, they looked at it, and they were just like, Oh, my God, what did we do? I can't even touch it. This thing is too dangerous.

Meryl and Posey went back through their earlier conversations with Nancy.

Some of the ways she reacted at certain questions were strange to us.

And so it's still on my closet shelf, and it still has that little plastic band around the shooter thing. Yeah. The shooter thing. There's a name for this.

There's a name for this? I've read Nancy's books. She knew it was called a trigger.

At the time when we first gave the death notification, we thought, this is a poor, older lady that just learned her husband of 20-some years was brutally shot to death at this place of work.

We believe it's Dan that is going to kill her.

Yeah, I got that when everybody gave me this sad sack look.

It seemed okay because we know everyone reacts differently to extreme stress, but she had some weird responses to certain things.

The only people I know who have ever hated him was his ex-wife, and who had checked Mark Dunheight? The husband.

I remember she laughed a couple of times. I thought at the time it was nervous laughter. On his phone, there's a picture of him with the rooster.

That's his favorite picture.

We went back and listened to it over and over.

They don't want to pay if it turns out that I secretly went down to the school and shot my husband because I thought, Hey, going into old age without Dan after 25 years, it's really what I'm looking for.

Then when you put it together with all these other pieces that we've assembled up to this point, it's super weird and everything looks very suspicious.

Have you got enough things that you really think you know or you think you've got the potential to solve it at this point? Even if you find who shot him, he's not going to bring him back. And I want him back. That's the word I want. I don't care about who shot him. I just want him back. I don't want him dead.

You start peeling away the layers, and that's how you discover that something much more nefarious This is going on.

About a month after Nancy's arrest, Detectives Meryl and Posey were burning the Midnight Oil at the office.

Most everybody's already I'm on home from the Detective Division. I'm on the computer looking through stuff.

Posey was scouring through Dan and Nancy's electronic records.

I want to get it. I want to get that piece of evidence.

Merrill was across the room working at a different cubicle.

I had another homicide that I had just gotten after the Brophy case, so I was scammed over there trying to figure things out.

Suddenly, Merrill heard something. It was coming from Posey's direction.

Darren would do this thing. He'd get this thing where he's excited about something, and he'd go, phew, phew, phew.

That's the sound of Detective Posey's finger guns. Merrill hurried over.

I'm like, What are you doing? What's going on? He's all smiling ear to ear.

Posey showed Meryl his computer screen. In Nancy's inbox, there was an email from eBay. It contained a receipt from a purchase.

A Glock nine millimeter barrel and slide.

A separate barrel and slide for a Glock handgun. I was like, Okay, this is it.

This person has done this, and I found how she did it.

All right, so here's a little anatomy of a gun for you. Picture a typical semi-automatic pistol. When you take a shot, there's a part on the top half of the gun that springs back during the recoil. That's the slide. Now, the barrel is housed inside of the slide and is the long metal tube that the bullet travels through to hit the target. What's really interesting about this part of a handgun is that it's completely detachable. You can switch out the slide and barrel of one gun of the same or similar model with another.

You can take this barrel and slide by itself. Then you can go and take the receiver of another Glock handgun, just the bottom part with the handle. You could put two of those items together, and that'll be a functional handgun.

Here's the real kicker. The barrel from the gun Nancy had given them is what their forensics team used to rule it out as the murder weapon. They looked at the markings and indentations on each spent shell casing and treated them like a fingerprint different. Their working theory was every single gun would leave a different pattern, and that pattern was specifically created by the barrel of the gun.

You change the signature if you have a different barrel and slide on the receiver of that gun by switching them out.

Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Nancy bought the unregistered ghost gun, couldn't put it together, and then bought a fully assembled gun at the gun show. Only problem was it's a registered weapon which can be traced back to her. So she got creative.

The theory was she used the receiver from the gun show gun.

That is, the bottom half of the gun.

Went out and got this barrel and slide, switched them out, committed this murder.

And then Nancy replaced the new slide and barrel with the original one. She handed over the gun on the day of the murder, knowing that the shell casings wouldn't match.

She thought she was smarter than everybody else. She thought, I can get away with this because I'm smart.

It was possible she still could get away with it.

All we have at this point is a purchase of a barrel and slide, and seeing that it had been mailed and paid for by a credit card by Nancy Brophy. If you do not have the correct slide and barrel, you do not have the evidence needed for that forensic lab scientist to make the comparison to those impressions on the casings.

There's a big difference between a smoking gun and a receipt for one.

It was one of those cases where we knew we had to try to think a little bit like we believed maybe Nancy had been thinking She started to seem like one of the characters in her books to me.

Fortunately for them, Assistant DA Nicole Herman had just gotten back from her honeymoon.

She talked about one of her books that one of the characters in the book had hidden a piece of evidence in a wall in their house.

Meryl was all ears.

It was like we were trying to think outside of the box and be creative.

Or in this case, maybe they needed to take the whole box apart and look Look Inside. You're about to hear a preview of Killer Psyche. While you're listening, follow Killer Psychie on the WNDYRI app or wherever you get your podcast.

Cribs.

63-year-old Daniel Dan Brophy had a routine. Every morning, he would wake up at dawn, feed the chickens, and then walk his dogs over to Starbucks to buy his wife, 68-year-old Nancy, a cup of coffee. He would then take a shower and get dressed. And after kissing his wife goodbye, he'd head to his teaching job at the Oregon Culinary Institute. On Saturday, June second, 2018, Dance Day reportedly began as it normally did, but it took an unexpected and deadly turn after he arrived at work at 7:20 AM. Five minutes after he arrived, Dan stood at a large industrial sink preparing for his class and did not see an armed intruder enter the kitchen, sneaking up behind him. The intruder fired into Dan's back. The bullet pierced his spine and heart. Then he collapsed to the floor. To make certain Dan was dead, the shooter stood over him and fired a second bullet into his chest. Then then fled the scene, leaving Dan to bleed out on the floor. As the students began to pour into the kitchen classroom, they found Dan lying on the floor. It took a few seconds for them to realize that blood was seeping through his chest onto his chef's uniform.

By the time first responders arrived, it was too late. Dan Brophy was pronounced dead at the scene.

You can listen to Killer Psyche early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Detectives Posey and Merrill pulled into the empty driveway of Nancy's home. This would be search number two for the murder weapon. But this time, they were going to take a very different approach. Chloe thinks we'll find money and drugs stashed around the house, so look for hiding places. He stripped the bed, hoisted the mattress, followed by the box springs. Gordie wasn't hiding his money under the mattress. Glenn pulled clothes out of the dresser's doors. There was a common theme in Nancy's books.

Secret compartments, hiding stuff, whether it's in a trunk or a secret room. I think one book has some mention of there being a hidden alcove under some stairs.

Nicole also knew that after Dan's murder, Nancy had done a lot of work on the house, trying to get it ready for sale.

She's not only clearing stuff out, putting stuff in storage units, in pods, but she is doing work on the yard, doing work on the house. We He got concerned that perhaps given the combination of her mind, what she's written about, and the fact that she's done work on the house, is it really that far removed to think that she may have hidden the murder weapon, which is really what we are looking for in a wall or somewhere else in her house.

Posey and Meryl started their search in the master bedroom. They slowly walked the perimeter of the room, then inspected the walk-in closet. And that's when they saw it.

It looked like a section had been cut out and somebody had drywalled it.

They got right to work. Posey and another member of the team began cutting into the sheetrock.

And they're searching all through the wall and trying to get in there, and they're just digging, digging. And they find absolutely nothing.

They moved their search to the kitchen.

Some of her characters hid components of weapons and stuff in and around the voids around kitchen appliances.

They searched every inch and crevice of the dishwasher, checked around the fridge, opened up the stove.

We looked at all kinds of things.

Then we started thinking, Well, maybe that garage again had some Heidi hole spot that we didn't see.

It didn't. There was no hidey hole spot, and there was no sign of that slide and barrel.

She had plenty enough time to be able to dispense of that item.

They'd been hoping her books would lead them straight to it. But in this case, Nancy had kept her fiction and her real life separate.

We know that people can get rid of guns fairly easily if they really put their mind to it. You could throw them in the ocean, you could throw them in the river, and they may never be found ever.

They had to come to terms with the fact that they might never find the murder weapon. It had been over three years since Nancy's arrest. The pandemic had put the trial on pause over and over again. But now, in January of 2022, DA Sean Overstreet, and Assistant DA, Nicole Herrman, were just weeks from the trial start date. Nicole kept asking herself, Do we have enough?

We obviously believed without a doubt that she killed her husband. That was never a question in our minds.

But without that murder weapon, did they have enough to convince a jury?

There's always a little bit of, I think, worry when you don't have... It's not on video, you don't have someone's like, Yep, I watched the whole thing, and this is exactly who did it, and they're caught with the murder weapon. It's not that case.

They had their work cut out for them. They were going to have to weave thousands of hours of investigation and interviews into a story. It would need to be enough, persuasive enough, that everyone in the courtroom could follow along.

Am I connecting the dots for them? Can they see it all there?

So they did what a lot of writers do when we're trying to craft a story. They broke out the Post-it notes.

So we would say, Okay, murder scene was one post-it note up at the top.

They added post-it notes for witnesses.

Who's going to tell this part of the story? Who's going to tell us about the insurance? Who's going to tell us about the guns?

The grid on the wall kept growing, but there was one name that kept coming up again and again, someone who'd been close to both Dan and Nancy, someone the defense was probably eyeing, too. Tanya Medlin opened the door to find Lisa Maxfield.

She was this little old lady.

Nancy's defense attorney.

She didn't really come across as a lawyer. She almost came across as like... I felt like she was Nancy's friend. I can't imagine this woman getting up there and getting down, fighting with another lawyer.

But Lisa had come prepared. Tanya showed her into the living room, and Lisa handed her a handwritten letter. It was from Nancy. Dear Tanya, I was so glad to hear from you. I'm really glad to know you still support me. Nancy had seen the People article where Tanya had spoken out in her defense. I thought you did a good job. It wouldn't surprise for you to be contacted by other news organizations as this drags on.

I hope you're doing well. I miss talking to you. I miss our coffee dates. I love you. I miss you. I'm thinking about you.

Tanya had been thinking about her friend, too. She had a lot of questions for Nancy's lawyer.

They said, All we can tell you is that Nancy's innocent, and then it'll come out of trial. But we, without a doubt, believe she is innocent, Tanya, with all our heart.

Nancy's lawyer also had a special request. The defense wanted Tanya to testify on Nancy's behalf.

They wanted me to be a character witness for Nancy.

So months later, when the subpoena arrived at her door, Tanya knew what she had to do.

Nancy was a close enough friend of mine. Nancy's never done me wrong. She's always looked out for me.

Soon after, Tanya was asked to come downtown to meet with Sean and Nicole. It was pretty apparent Nicole that Tanya didn't want to be there.

She was very clear with us, I am going to be honest. I am going to tell the truth about everything I know, whether it helps the case or doesn't help the case, because I'm just that is who I am. I'm going to tell it all.

Maybe Tanya was hoping her honesty would turn them off, but it didn't.

My luck is going to be I'm going to probably get served on both sides, which is exactly what happened.

And as much as she wanted to believe her friend was innocent, she still questions.

Why was her van at the school if she didn't do this? I asked her where the hell she was. She said she was at home in bed, sleeping. How can you be at home in bed, sleeping and your van be around the school at the same time? Just answer me, because I feel like I deserve an answer.

Behind bars, Nancy seemed to be sorting through a few questions of her own.

I'm stunned because my response is, I'm on TV. That must mean I'm guilty. No, you're not. You know you're not. You did not do that. You did not do that.

As weeks in jail became months and then years, Nancy was changing.

Some people certainly don't believe it. You know how Dan and I were? I know. You guys loved each other. Yeah. Okay. It's being recorded, so I'm staying on record how much I know you guys loved each other, and I know that you're innocent and that your friends love you.

She began to sound more worried, sad even. Over the crackle of the prison phone, family and friends delivered more bad news.

I was hoping, Nancy, that I wasn't going to have to share this with you until you were out. I need you to know that Pee Bee passed several months ago.

Pee Bee was Nancy's beloved dog, Peanut better.

And I'm so sorry, Nancy. That is just one more thing.

She'd lost relatives, and she'd also lost the support of friends.

Kim never came, and so I dropped her from the list.

One of those friends was Nancy's writing partner, Kim Wullenberg.

I thought Kim would be there for you. And one of the things somebody said to me yesterday, they said, One of the things you find out in jail is who stands with you and who doesn't.

I could have written her more, but I just didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to somebody like that? I thought, Well, I don't want to tell her about my life that I felt was going well when she's where she's at. I thought, How fair is that? So it's like, Well, what do I say?

I just didn't say anything.

But there was one thing that hadn't changed. Nancy was still writing.

I'm about halfway through it on the first draft.

She'd been scribbling page after page and passing them along to her friends on the outside to type up.

But what's interesting is I stopped writing. I wasn't sure where the plot was going. I sat down and I said, What's my life without the books I read? I said, You got to come up with a twist. And all of a sudden, I did, We killed him. And how?

Interesting.

I'm about to get back to finishing that up.

But Nancy's mind wasn't just on her latest book. She was also thinking about the most important story of her life, the story her lawyers would tell about her and Dan at her trial. For that story, she was also going to introduce a twist, something that no one in the courtroom would see coming. Follow Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy on the WNDYRI app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery. Com/survey. From WNDYRI and the Oregonians. This is episode 5 of 6 of Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy. Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy, is hosted by me, Heidi Trutheway. This series is reported by Zane Sparling. Additional editing by Margaret Hobberman. Senior producer is Tracey Edbas. Senior Story Editor is Natalie Shisha. Associate producer is Sam Hobson. Listen. With writing from Nicole Perkins. Casting by Rachel Reece. Voice talent by Kristen Egarmaier, Dustin Rubin, and Kristen Price. Sound design, mixing an additional composition by Daniel Nell. Sound Supervisor is Marcelino V.

L. Pando. Music Supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisan Sync. Fact Checking by Anika Robbins. Senior managing producercer is Latha Pandia. Managing producers are Olivia Webber and Heather Baloga. Executive producers for Advanced Local are Richard Diamond and Selena Roberts. Executive producers are Nigeria producers are Najri Eton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jenn Sargent for WNDRI.

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