Host of new podcast based on Oregon murder case talks about the shocking true story (2024)

The sensational case of Nancy Crampton Brophy, an Oregon woman who wrote an essay titled, “How to Murder Your Husband,” and was later convicted of committing that very crime, fascinated people who heard about it from The Oregonian/OregonLive reports, and other news coverage.

For Heidi Joy Tretheway, however, the saga hit closer to home. Tretheway had known Crampton Brophy when Tretheway was a member of the Rose City Romance Writers, the Portland chapter of the national organization, the Romance Writers of America.

“I was completely stunned,” Tretheway said in a recent phone conversation. The idea that “you knew a murderer, that you shared the same air with that person – it’s beyond the pale.”

As it turned out, Tretheway’s acquaintance with Crampton Brophy, and her own knowledge of romance writing led to Tretheway hosting “Happily Never After: Dan and Nancy,” a new program from the Wondery podcast studio.

The podcast, which is the first entry in a new true crime anthology series, is available on podcast platforms beginning June 3.

“Happily Never After: Dan and Nancy” tells a genuinely strange-but-true story. As The Oregonian/OregonLive reported, it all began when students at the now-defunct Oregon Culinary Institute found chef Daniel Brophy, an instructor at the school, on the floor of a classroom, the morning of June 2, 2018.

Daniel Brophy had been shot, and his wounds were fatal.

As investigators looked for evidence, Nancy Crampton Brophy, who had been married to Daniel Brophy for more than 25 years, emerged as a suspect. She had self-published several romance novels, but it was another piece of Crampton Brophy’s writing that helped propel the crime case into the national spotlight.

Related: ‘Happily Never After’ podcast exposes stranger-than-fiction crimes of Oregon romance novelist

In 2011, Crampton Brophy had written an online essay titled, “How to Murder Your Husband.” As The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in September 2018 -- shortly after Crampton Brophy had been charged with killing her husband -- the essay included Crampton Brophy noting that, “As a romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and, consequently, about police procedure.”

Crampton Brophy also listed various ways a spouse might kill a husband, including guns, knives, poison, or hiring a hit man.

“I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them,” Crampton Brophy wrote. “I don’t want to worry about blood and brains splattered on my walls. And really, I’m not good at remembering lies. But the thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough.”

The “Happily Never After: Dan and Nancy” podcast includes interviews with detectives, people who knew Nancy Crampton Brophy, members of Daniel Brophy’s family, and others.

Tretheway, who lives in Ridgefield, Washington, said she originally came to this story “as a background character.”

Related: ‘Happily Never After’ pulls back curtain on a Portland murder: Beat Check podcast

People working on the podcast initially contacted Tretheway “to get a better sense of Nancy, and the Rose City Romance writers,” she said. “I was able to bring a lot more details about the writer’s life, and publishing, and everything from that romance community that I’ve now been in for 12 years. Then they came back to me, maybe six months after that original interview, and said, we think you might be the right person to narrate, because I was close enough to the story to understand the world of writers, and to know Nancy.”

But she was far enough removed that, unlike some of Crampton Brophy’s friends, Tretheway had never become a member of what she calls “Team Guilty,” or “Team Innocent.”

As she recounts in the podcast, Tretheway met Crampton Brophy in 2013, in the Rose City Romance Writers group.

“Nancy liked to be the queen bee,” Tretheway, 47, said. “She was always at the front of the room, kind of orchestrating the meetings, doling out sometimes very unsolicited advice. She definitely had presence. As we say in the podcast, she had main character energy. That was the biggest impression that I took away from her, she was the main character at the meetings, in her own life, and in her own mind.”

Tretheway wasn’t a close friend of Crampton Brophy’s, and she was no longer a part of the Rose City Romance Writers group when Daniel Brophy was killed.

When that news broke, Tretheway found it hard to believe thar Crampton Brophy, who was in her 60s and seemed “like a very harmless person,” could have had anything to do with the crime.

“She just didn’t seem like the kind of person who would be capable of murder, or motivated to murder,” Tretheway said. “From all accounts, she had this beautiful, loving relationship with her husband.”

Once Crampton Brophy was arrested and went to trial, Tretheway said, “I just kind of watched it happen. When I came to this podcast, I started with this idea that, objectively, a jury has convicted her. She has been sentenced. But I allowed myself to go into this story and follow all these twists and turns and dead ends, and the way the investigators were uncovering this material. I was almost like a member of the jury myself. I had the moment where I just kind of accepted, OK, she’s been convicted. And then I had the moment of, oh, I think she did it.”

“Happily Never After: Dan and Nancy” is an example of the enduring popularity of true crime tales, which have captured audiences in news accounts, movies, TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, and more. Wondery, for example, has established a series of true crime franchise podcasts. As the press materials say, “Each original season of ‘Happily Never After’ will feature real-life bad romance stories of love gone awry and the unbelievable aftermath.”

Before she began writing romance novels and working in marketing, Tretheway was a journalist, whose career included covering everything from commercial real estate to “crime, cops, courts, etc.,” as she said.

“I think that people are really drawn to true crime because it’s like a magic trick, it is defying the reality that you know,” Tretheway said. “It’s somebody committing a crime and it being so completely off your radar, you’d never believe they were a murderer. You know, people say, ‘Oh, that’s my neighbor, he was this mild-mannered guy, he was very nice, he let me borrow a cup of sugar.’ And then you find out later this person is actually a criminal. I think it’s that defiance of the reality we believe that makes it so intriguing.”

The podcast also explores Crampton Brophy’s desire to turn her self-published novels into mainstream success. Tretheway isn’t sure whether Brophy would have killed her husband if she had realized her writing ambitions.

“She says in one of her blog posts that she thinks that every one of us has the capacity to murder, and that when pushed far enough, we all could snap,” Tretheway said. “And that’s her world view. That’s not my world view. So, maybe she always had it in her, and she was pushed far enough. I don’t know.”

The podcast also goes into the matter of whether Crampton Brophy was confusing her fiction with reality, Tretheway said.

“Did she really think thar she could orchestrate a murder in the same way that she would plot out a character who killed her husband? Did she really think that she could get away with it because she thought she was smarter than everyone, or she thought, well, if I can orchestrate this in a book, I could probably do this in real life? Those are the kinds of questions that we’re trying to answer.”

— Kristi Turnquist covers features and entertainment. Reach her at 503-221-8227, kturnquist@oregonian.com or @Kristiturnquist