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Detectives Anthony Merrill and Darren Posey pulled up to Nancy Brophy's house. I remember the yard looked immaculate, like a sod had just been put in. The landscaping was manicured. In the three months since Dan died, things had changed, like quickly. The chickens were gone. The basement had been cleared out. All the blackberry vines had been cut down.
It was like there was an expectation in place once Dan was dead to move forward with the rest of what she was planning to do with her life. The cops split up. We all took different quadrants of the house and focused on those areas. They were searching for something, anything, that could lead them closer to solving the crime. They checked the basement, the large garage in the back, the half-acre yard. All the way back to the property line.
The sun started to set. The cops who were outside switched on their flashlights and searched through every remaining nook and cranny. They found nothing. But up in the main bedroom on the second floor, Marilyn Posey stumbled on something odd. Nancy's laptop was on her bed.
Next to the laptop was some random insurance paperwork, which didn't surprise them. They knew Nancy sold insurance as a side hustle. She would write up life insurance policies for some of her family members and other people as part of her work. But there, right next to the policies, was a letter. They carefully picked it up. It was addressed to Dan. Dearest Dan, I love you.
The years we've had together have been the best of my life. It was you who made it possible. Thank you.
While words are my life, I find myself somewhat at a loss to express how happy you have made me. In the letter, Nancy talked about an upcoming operation. I realized how difficult it would be for you if I died during surgery. More than anything, I'm afraid your life would be worse because you might leave money on the table that will help you get through this period. She told Dan what to do.
Her instructions were very detailed. And in her letter, she talked about how he could sell the house.
If you decide not to sell the house, consider a roommate to offset the costs. I understand you think you can live in a tiny house, but you like stuff way too much to make that work.
who to contact for the mortgage, who to contact for the real estate agent. Then it talked about different insurance policies that she had and how he would proceed to put a claim on those insurance policies for her. Forrester's is the only policy I have that is over two years old. This money should come in quickly. She'd thought of everything. She'd even left instructions on publishing the final book in her romantic suspense series.
They read the letter again and again. It seemed a little odd to us. On the surface, it was a loving letter from a wife to her husband. And she was really concerned about him and wanted to make sure he was okay. It certainly lined up with the story of Dan and Nancy they'd been told by everyone else.
Nancy always made Dan to be out like the not real financial technical guy, but more of the artistic cooker guy. And she did all the financial stuff. In fact, Dan's nickname for Nancy was Management. And they knew that Nancy had an operation on her eyes a few years back. But something about the letter seemed off.
For one... It was just obviously laying right out there on the bed or right next to the bed with the laptop. Years after she would have had that surgery. There was no date on it, so we didn't know when it was written. So it's hard to say if she knew that something was about to happen or if she anticipated that we were going to make an arrest on her before she moved. They knew that Nancy knew that they'd been watching her. She was telling neighbors that she believed she was a suspect in this investigation.
Could she have written this letter, printed it out, and left it just for them? We definitely didn't rule out that this possibly was a red herring that she had, you know, created. I'm thinking she's this romance mystery novelist. It was like they were looking at two stories at the same time. The story Nancy wanted them to see and the real story. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.
But they had to trust that the real story would give them answers. That when they found it, it would explain not just how Nancy did it, but why. Have you ever covered a carpet stain with a rug? Ignored a leaky faucet?
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This is Chapter 4, Dearest Dan. Posey and Merrill, along with a team of about 10 officers, pulled up to a run-of-the-mill storage facility. Their search through Nancy's house hadn't turned up much, but one thing they had found was a receipt for a storage unit less than 30 minutes from her home.
They made their way down a narrow driveway, past unit after unit with identical orange doors. Merrill was cautiously optimistic. Maybe that gun's in one of those? And when they got to Nancy's unit, he felt even better. It wasn't large. I mean, it was probably about, I don't know, 10 feet by 12 feet. Maybe they could make quick work of this.
The storage unit was just filled from floor to ceiling with boxes and boxes of stuff. It was going to be another long search. The cops set up a relay system. We had searchers in two or three different areas where a relay team would drop off the boxes. Whenever they found something of interest... You would yell out and our criminalists would then come over and photograph and video the box.
The first few boxes were full of clothes and random household goods. Flour pots, things of that nature, and then kitchen items, plates and things like that. But it was still heavy lifting and exhausting work. As the day went on, the temperature kept rising. The team had to strip down to their t-shirts. They sliced open more boxes.
One was filled to the rim with Nancy's romance novels, including The Wrong Cop. The team found themselves face-to-face with a shirtless detective in sunglasses, aiming a pistol at just the right angle to make his biceps. It wasn't my cup of tea, as I guess you might say if you're not, you know, I'm not going to say anything more about that. Yeah, not my cup of tea.
Suddenly, one of the investigators called out. He looked very serious and he said, hey, I've got something here. And I remember we all walked over. He flipped over the top of the box to show everyone the writing on it. I remember two of the things it said. One thing it said was scarves. And then the other thing it said was GK. GK. Just two letters. They didn't know what that meant. The investigator opened the box. Beneath a pile of scarves, he'd hit something solid.
He pulled out a hard plastic case. We opened the container up. There, laying in front of them, was a handgun. We were like, oh my God, this is the gun. This is it. This is everything. They'd found the murder weapon. You know, we were pretty excited. And then, Detective Posey noticed...
Well, this thing's not even put together. I mean, this is still all in its pieces. Inside the box were all the parts needed to build a handgun. The frame, the magazine. It wasn't a gun. It was a gun kit. A ghost gun. I'd heard about them, but never really seen one yet. But Posey had. He'd seen them while working the robbery detail.
And because they're not selling the whole gun, they can sell it in pieces and you have to put it together. There's no serial number that has to be registered with law enforcement. Law enforcement has no way to track these guns. They also require a lot of work. They come in intricate pieces you have to drill and put together, kind of like a DIY gun. Except in this case, it looked like no one ever got around to the do-it-yourself part.
It was still in the packaging. This gun never got put together. They thought maybe she'd switched out some of these parts with the gun she'd handed over to them. And I thought, no, that's not going to fit. It's not the right size. The mood in the room shifted. We went from a very high to a very low. It felt like they'd just hit another brick wall.
But we're also still, why didn't Nancy ever tell us about this? You know, why would she have this? What is the purpose of this? We know this is somehow relevant to this case. They just didn't know how. Deputy District Attorney Nicole Herman was packing for her honeymoon.
She had just married the love of her life on a rustic farm in rural Oregon. We dated for a bit in law school, went our separate ways, and then got back together post-law school. They were off on their honeymoon through Europe. London, Montenegro, Bosnia. She was especially excited about Croatia.
It's just beautiful. There's national parks and there's lakes and waterfalls. Sunscreen? Check. Sandals? Check. And last but not least, her Kindle. Check. Even with her busy work schedule, Nicole always tried to make time to read.
I read a fair amount of, I would say, fantasy or science fiction. I will also read, I like some historical fiction books. But her honeymoon reading was a little different. Nicole had loaded up her Kindle with Nancy's romantic suspense books. The detectives hadn't shown much interest in them. Like Meryl had said, Not my cup of tea. But Nicole was intrigued.
She'd heard about Nancy's essay, How to Murder Your Husband, but she didn't know all that much about Nancy's books, other than... One of her books is called The Wrong Husband, which was an interesting title given what she was being accused of. On the sunny beaches of Croatia, Nicole poured over each book.
Her husband wasn't bothered by the hot Navy SEALs stealing Nicole's attention. He was fine with it. I'm not like sitting there taking detailed notes or, you know, typing on my email or something like that. I'm mostly just kind of reading and absorbing. And there was a lot to read and absorb.
Sometimes you read a crime book, and as someone who works in that field, you can tell when somebody has knowledge of how the system works or how police procedure works or an investigation and when someone does not. And what struck me in reading these is there was clearly an understanding here. Nancy wrote a lot about how the police operated, how much evidence they'd need to detain a suspect, and how much evidence they'd need to convict them.
This was someone who had really done her research. All the books in Nancy's series, Wrong Never Felt So Right, had strikingly similar plot lines. The Wrong Hero. The Wrong Hero.
Twelve years in a marriage that was really a prison. If push came to shove, she would not willingly step back into a hell of somebody else's making. The wrong cop. At work, as she measured ingredients, she plotted her husband's death.
The wrong husband. This was her only possibility of escape, and she'd spent hours readying herself. Her plan was to succeed or die trying. There was always a woman in a troubled relationship. There is often a husband she's trying to get away from. Either he's nefarious or he treated her badly. Then the woman, usually with the help of a handsome ex-Navy SEAL, tries to regain control of her life.
In almost all the books, there's a gun involved, and you can guess what happens next. She squeezed the trigger like he'd shown her. Not once, not twice, but three times. A hole appeared in his forehead. Blood bubbled between his eyes, and a river flowed down his face. Her husband lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. Dory had fired the fatal shot.
It was interesting to Nicole that all these books had been published several years before Dan's murder. First, you write it out, and then now you've kind of thought through that creative process. Does that then bleed over into your personal life? But obviously, you can't use novels as evidence. Nicole couldn't put Nancy's characters on trial. She couldn't cross-examine them about Nancy's feelings about marriage.
But there was one person in Nancy's past who could maybe speak to that. And did you guys become intimate pretty quickly after you started dating? Yeah, pretty quickly. Okay. Nancy's first husband. Do you know where your box of old home movies is? When was the last time you made sure the box they're in isn't too hot, damp, or moldy?
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Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Maybe you'll find inspiration in the incredible true story of black female mathematicians at NASA in Hidden Figures, or the fantasy world of Throne of Glass. There's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog,
New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. Joe was milling around the Houston airport with his wife. Joe isn't his real name, by the way. He asked us to use Joe to protect his privacy. Boarding wouldn't start for another few minutes, and he wanted some light reading. I happened to pick up a People magazine article.
When he opened it, he found himself face-to-face with a mugshot of his ex-wife. I was just, I was stunned. He hadn't seen Nancy since their divorce in 1980. It just said that she had been arrested for killing her husband of, you know, X number of years. Joe didn't know what to make of that. But when Detective Merrill showed up at his door, he let him in.
Merrill was hoping Joe could help him fill in some of the bigger gaps in Nancy's history. Can you tell us how you guys met and maybe just walk us back in time a little bit? I was a police officer in Wichita Falls at the time. That's right. Nancy's first husband was a cop. And I met her mother through...
This was back in the late 1970s. Joe was working as an investigator for Nancy's mother, a defense attorney. Well, one week, Nancy was there, and that's where I met her.
Nancy took the seat next to him, and they started talking. She was fun to talk to. Very outgoing, very friendly, cheerful. Six months later, they eloped. Joe couldn't remember who proposed to who. You know, I really don't know. It just seemed like a good damn idea at the time. Everything with Nancy was easy. Nancy was just...
She was different from the rest of her family. Her mother was a defense attorney. Her brother was a civil attorney. And her sister... You guessed it. Okay. Okay.
Okay, so a lot of attorneys in the family, but Nancy never went to law school. No. Nancy described herself as the black sheep in her family. She wanted to carve out a different path for herself. She'd recently graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in economics. In school, she'd written and distributed a pamphlet on women's reproductive health. It was called Between Your Navel and Your Knees. I don't know why I remember that, but I do.
She was also active in student government and led pro-choice rallies. While she was married to Joe, she started writing fiction. She wrote a story. Some guy who was in the construction business and he got hit in the head and he lost his memory and he started seeing visions and stuff. Joe wasn't impressed. It was not going to make the bestseller list. Joe and Nancy didn't stay married for long.
Not because he didn't love her writing. He moved to another town for graduate school, and the long-distance thing just didn't work for them. The divorce was quick and amicable. Through it all, Nancy was always a peace and love hippie kind of girl. You know, just the opposite of what she's charged with. Merrill left the interview more confused than ever.
What could have turned the Nancy her first husband remembered so fondly into the Nancy who took her second husband's life? Detective Posey was at the office sorting through the contents of Nancy's cell phone and laptop. Most everybody's already gone home from the detective division. I'm on the computer looking through stuff. He needed to get through years of text messages between Nancy and Dan.
So far, they weren't telling him anything he hadn't already been told. About Nancy's role as quote-unquote management, taking care of Dan's schedule. From Nancy. Handling the bills. From Dan. Nancy. About Nancy's peculiar sense of humor.
From Dan. Did you get my voicemail? Nancy. No, call me. Dan. Are you free? Nancy. I'd prefer to think of myself as reasonably priced, but I'm alone if that's what you meant. And their busy sex life. From Dan. I'm home. Dogs out. Pants off. Hurry home soonest. Their tone was alternately jokey and loving. From Dan. Feeling any better? No.
Nancy. Hacking away. Dan. Need anything to help feel better? Nancy. One million dollars. The only hint of tension in their relationship came up around money. And I know money was always a thing for them. That's Nancy's friend, Kim Wallenberg, in an interview with Merrill. Once she left being the caterer, her income dropped, obviously.
Nancy had sold off her catering company in the early 2000s. At its height, her company was making about $500,000 a year. And for a while, with the profit from the sale and the income from Dan's teaching job, they were doing okay. But that didn't last. Month to month, they were spending more than they were making. And by 2016, their finances were in pretty rough shape.
Dan and Nancy's friends and family didn't know the details, but there were signs of how bad things had gotten. Like the time Nancy asked Kim to borrow $500 so she could go to a writing conference.
Nancy was selling insurance policies on the side, but the money from her sales came in slowly. She was waiting for that, the payment to come from the sale she had made for the Medicare insurance. And once it came in, she paid me back. But Nancy didn't want to have to ask for loans. And it was stressful. I know it was stressful. And then there was the strangeness of the vanishing car.
In the summer of 2016, Dan's mom Karen dropped by their house and noticed Nancy's Prius was missing. And I said, Nancy, where's your car? Nancy told her she'd sold it to one of her friends who really needed it.
And I said, oh, really? And she said, yeah. And then I said, well, how are you going to get around? Well, she said, Dana's going to take public transportation and I'm going to drive his truck. And I remember thinking, over my dead body. Karen and her husband had a spare car sitting in their garage, the same silver minivan that showed up on the footage at the pizza shop. And so we decided we'd just let them have that car.
Karen suspected Nancy's writing wasn't going well. She'd ask, Well, how are the books going? And she was always rather evasive about how the books were actually going. But Nancy's inbox painted a very clear picture.
Dear author, thanks so much for letting us take a look at your materials. Unfortunately, the project you described does not suit our list at this time. Even though your project is not right for us, it might be right for another agent, so don't give up. After over a decade of writing romance, Nancy still didn't have an agent or a publisher. She was still self-publishing and offering her books online for free.
Meanwhile, Dan had to take out a loan on his retirement savings. They were pretty much living paycheck to paycheck. Tanya had no idea how bad things had gotten until she casually mentioned to Nancy that she was looking for a part-time prep cook at the nursing home. She'd been thinking, a student, maybe someone who needed extra credit.
Nancy proposed another idea. She goes, well, Dan will just do it. I'm like, Dan don't want to come work for me. He'd been her instructor in culinary school. She goes, no, I'll send him over there. You can tell him about the job and see what he says. I said, okay. To her surprise, Dan came down to the kitchen and took the job on the spot. He worked during the week at the school. He worked weekends for me. Which meant the guy didn't have a day off.
But at least at first, Dan was surprisingly great to work with. Tanya had expected Dan to be the same strict, stoic guy she knew from school. But when things got tense in the kitchen, Dan would start belting out Grateful Dead songs. It turned out that he liked a lot of the same music that I did. You know what? Tanya kind of liked this guy. But I didn't know this until he came to work for me.
Tanya would even tease him about Nancy's steamy romance novels. I go, there must be a firecracker in bed. And he's like, I'm not talking to you anymore. I didn't walk away. Over the next few months, Tanya and Dan grew closer. But then, in the months right before Dan's murder, something changed.
He's constantly in a bad mood. He seemed distracted. He wasn't following instructions. Not just for complicated tasks, but for really simple, basic things, like labeling products with the correct expiration date. I'm your supervisor, and I'm telling you this is something that cannot happen. It cannot happen. This is health care. I need you to correct it. And I've been asking you and asking you and asking you, and you won't correct it.
A few months before Dan's murder, Tanya brought Dan into her office and gave him a written warning. Dan was not happy about that. He was so offended and mad that he flung it at me across my desk. Tanya immediately called Nancy. Going, what the hell's his problem? He's becoming a nightmare at work for me.
Because he's mad. He's constantly in a bad mood. And she finally was like, he's not mad at you. He's mad at me. And I'm like, what the hell are you doing, Nancy? She goes, I'm moving his shit. She was out there in the yard moving his stuff, cleaning things up, and it was pissing him off. It turns out Nancy and Dan had very different ideas about how to get their finances in order. Dan's solution was to work more. Nancy's was to sell the house and move abroad, live somewhere cheaper.
She'd filled her Pinterest board with pins like seven ways to get the most out of living abroad and the 10 unexpected benefits of expat life. And did Nancy ever, did she ever confide in you wanting to potentially move from her house or anything of that nature? Kim told Meryl, oh, sure. She talked about it all the time and she wanted to move to, is it Portugal? But,
Dan, hey, she said she had to convince him. Dan had all these projects going on in the backyard with all these gardens that were extensive, complicated things with cages underground and the chickens. She didn't like the chickens. Nancy wanted to sell that house, downsize, move to a different country, be an expat. And he just didn't really want to do that.
Dan had one idea of what the future looked like, and then Nancy had a different idea, and those ideas weren't coinciding. Posey and Merrill hired an expert to dig up more specifics about Dan and Nancy's finances. And over the next few months, new details began trickling in.
Earlier on in the investigation, Nancy had told the detectives that she and Dan had about $40,000 in life insurance. But the paper trail told another story.
There were several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth across multiple insurance companies. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $800,000 to maybe $850,000. Maybe you're thinking, well, Nancy did sell insurance. Maybe she really believed in the principle of it. Maybe she wanted to make sure that no matter who died first, they'd both be taken care of.
But the majority of the policies were taken out on only one of them. Based on what we had at this point, she had all these different policies on Dan. It wasn't clear if Dan had even known about it. Nancy was the person that did the bills. Dan was kind of, you know, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's do that. And the accounts showed that even when Dan and Nancy got behind on their mortgage…
Payments were made on the insurance policies every single month. And they were expensive. Like over $1,000 a month expensive. It was a red flag to us for sure. District Attorney Sean Overstreet looked over the numbers with them.
Nancy's train of thought was becoming clearer. Their financial issues really probably went back to 2016. That's when they started spending more than they were bringing in. And when that money was going and it was pretty clear, you could draw a straight line in their bank account and see that money was going to be gone. There was nothing left after that. Dan wasn't going to make more money. Nancy wasn't going to make any more money. They were in trouble. Nancy considered her options. So what we started to think was, well...
If you get a divorce and you sell the house, she may have gotten $100,000.
She's 67 years old. She needs to live off that $100,000 the rest of her life. That's not going to cut it. So she began buying policies on Dan. Nancy could have these proceeds from the life insurance, the sale of the house, and live a comfortable life, and then have the freedom to do what she wanted to do. And maybe that was the key to this whole thing, is she wanted to go one direction, he didn't. She began planning. We knew that she had taken great effort, time, energy,
money that they didn't have at the time, to buy all these things to affect this, what she might have considered was going to be the perfect crime. Meryl and Posey weren't going to let her get away with it. They were more determined than ever to find that murder weapon.
But sometimes, in order to catch a criminal... A lot of people were talking about, well, have you read all the books? And we're all looking at each other like, no. You have to step into the imagination of one. One of the characters in the book had hidden a piece of evidence in a wall in their house. That's on the next episode of Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy. ♪
If you like Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus 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 at wondery.com slash survey. From Wondery and The Oregonian, this is Episode 4 of 6.
of Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy. Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy is hosted by me, Heidi Trethewey. This series is reported by Zane Sparling. Additional editing by Margaret Haberman. Senior producer is Tracy Egbas. Senior story editor is Natalie Shisha.
Associate producer is Sam Hobson with writing from Nicole Perkins. Casting by Rachel Reese. Voice talent by Kristen Eggermeyer, Dustin Rubin, and Kristen Price. Sound design, mixing, and additional composition by Daniel Brunel. Sound supervisor is Marcelino Villalpando. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesun Sync.
Fact-checking by Annika Robbins. Senior Managing Producer is Latha Pandya. Managing Producers are Olivia Weber and Heather Beloga. Executive Producers for Advanced Local are Richard Diamond and Selena Roberts. Executive Producers are Nigeri Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent for Wondery.
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