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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy, early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Nicole Herman was lounging on a beach in Croatia with a perfect view of the ocean.
It looks a lot like Oregon, with the exception that the water is like turquoise. It was nice and sunny, exactly how Nicole pictured her honeymoon. Nicole's new husband got up to take a swim, but she didn't join him. She was in the middle of a novel. The man on the book cover had a square jaw and a come-hither stare. All day, Nicole had just been waiting to get back to him.
He sat on the floor and gestured for her to sit between his legs. He showed her how every gun worked, then loaded and unloaded each of them. "Are you showing me this so I can kill my husband?" Travis spoke slowly, choosing each word with care. "Maybe in the beginning you meant something to him, but now you're just another loose end. He will know a hundred ways to kill you and make it look like an accident."
Scandalous. I was probably reading anywhere from 150 to 300 pages a day. Nicole had been laid out on the beach for hours reading.
She was already on book number two in the Wrong Never Felt So Right series, and she was determined to get through all five books by the end of her trip. Every book was more or less the same. Burleigh, former Navy SEAL, comes to the rescue of beautiful young woman on the run from her dangerous husband. It was an odd choice of reading for a honeymoon.
But away from the beaches of Croatia, back home in Portland, Oregon, Nicole was a deputy district attorney. Those are things as a prosecutor that you sometimes want to get ahead of and in front of. And for months, she and her team had been trying to solve a murder. But progress had been slow. Direct evidence kept eluding them.
As the pressure mounted, Nicole and her team had turned to an unlikely lead, a series of romance novels written by the dead man's wife. It was a little bit meta in terms of what we were dealing with. Her books were packed with details borrowed from their own lives as a local Portland chef and a romance novelist. Details that the DAs had no other way to get their hands on.
So now Nicole was doing homework on her honeymoon. I wasn't so sure there would truly be anything, but it was sort of in the back of my mind, what if something similar to this has played out in one of her novels and it's all written right there for us to find? More shirts were going to be unbuttoned. More dresses were going to get unzipped.
And every new chapter, every new scene, could potentially be the one to crack the murder case that was waiting for her back home. Have you ever covered a carpet stain with a rug? Ignored a leaky faucet?
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From Wondery and The Oregonian, I'm Heidi Trethewey. If they ask me, I could write a book. And this is Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy. And the simple secret of the plot. This is Chapter One, Plot Twist. Plot Twist
As a romance writer, I can tell you, there are only two rules that every good romance story needs to follow. Number one, there's always a happily ever after. And that's true whether you're writing about falling in love with a prince, a ghost, or a time-traveling vampire.
The love interests have to end up together. Number two, you need a strong main character. Someone who grabs your attention. Somebody you can't turn away from. Somebody like Nancy Brophy.
I first met Nancy back in 2013 in Portland, Oregon, when I joined our local writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers. Nancy made an impression, not just on me, but on almost everyone in our group. She was very popular because she was out there and she put herself out there and she wasn't one to sit in the back of the room, timid and, you know, afraid. She'd walk right up to you and kind of introduce herself. She didn't have a shy bone in her body about, you know,
forking up things she did that were silly or goofy. She even had a thing where she would hand out roses to writers for finishing their novels, like she was on The Bachelor. Nancy had real main character energy. And true to form, she also had a real-life love story that came straight out of a romance novel.
She came home from school one day, and I remember this like it was yesterday. Tanya Medlin first met Nancy in the early 90s. Nancy was in her 40s and recently divorced. She was looking for a fresh start in Portland, Oregon, where she enrolled in culinary school. She found an apartment with Tanya, who'd just graduated.
One evening after school, Nancy walked in as Tanya was making dinner. She goes, "Hey, I got a question." I said, "Yeah." And she goes, "What do you know about Chef Brophy?" Chef Dan Brophy was one of the instructors at the culinary school.
He had a handlebar mustache and ran his kitchen with military-style precision. The carrots had to be diced exactly a quarter inch on each side. The bacon had to be the exact right level of crisp. I said, Chef Murphy, I know he's married. And she said, she just kind of looked at me. She goes, yeah, that ain't going to last. And I went, oh, really? I said, OK, Nancy, watch your shit. You're going to get, you're going to step in it.
But once Nancy put her mind to something, she didn't stop until she got it. After she graduated from the year-long program, she stayed back at the school, working for Ramsey Hayden at the deli. She said the minute I was in his class, I was like, this guy is just awesome. His personality, his, you know, his charm.
By this time, Dan and his ex-wife had officially filed for divorce, and Ramsey began hearing rumors about something between Dan and Nancy. They definitely kept it on the low. You never made it obvious that they had a thing going. They never held hands or hugged or went and visited each other.
Ramsey just suddenly began seeing a lot more of Dan. I noticed that he was making a little more visits to the deli. He would come to the deli and pour himself a hot water to make a tea and walk in just to see her and then walk out.
A couple years after that conversation with Nancy, Tanya was sitting in a hall attending the wedding reception of Nancy and the now-divorced Dan Brophy. They were in love. They were very happy. They're, you know, giggling all the time. By the year 2000, Dan and Nancy had settled into their own place, a modern four-bedroom home in the suburbs.
Tanya was happy that Nancy was happy. But Chef Brophy? Tanya still didn't get it. He was so serious. He was so freaking serious. Nancy's close friend and fellow romance writer, Kim Wollenberg, would drop by their place for lunch or dinner. And there were entire meals where Dan barely said a word. He was very quiet, you know. He didn't engage a lot. ♪
Dan wasn't into small talk. He was the kind of guy who liked to spend weekends deep in the woods foraging for rare mushrooms. Ramsey went with him a couple of times. He would just be like a kid at Disneyland. You know, he was just excited to, you know, his feet would start moving before he hit the ground out of the car. And, you know, he'd say, spread out. Don't walk by me. I'm finding my own. Spread out. Dan would come back home with his haul and meticulously clean them with a little mushroom brush.
He'd sit and brush the mushroom really nice and clean and gently. And he would hold it and look at it and admire it. When Dan wasn't teaching or foraging, he had his nose in a book on marine biology or composting. Dan was a big no-waste guy. He made sure the extra food from the culinary school went to the homeless in the area.
Back at home, he turned his half-acre backyard into a science project where he grew things like edible flowers and thornless blackberries. And then there were the chicken coops. Dan kept over 40 chickens, turkeys, and a little rooster he named Jerry. Some might say that Dan was more comfortable talking to chickens than people.
Nancy, preferred people.
She once showed up to our writing group in a full chicken costume. With the orange legs and everything like that. Just to make her friends laugh. She would tell the story about the chickens doing something, whether they got out of their pen, whether they were running around the yard, whether Dan had too many or not enough. They were opposites that attracted. She was more outgoing and active, and he was a homebody. But even her friends had to admit...
It seemed to work. I was jealous of their relationship. I thought they were so close together and they seemed to be complete partners, like simpatico with each other. They seemed to really just fit. I never got the feeling there was any conflict whatsoever between them, with the exception of the chickens.
I can't tell you when I fell in love with my husband, but I relate the moment I decided to marry him. Nancy often wrote about Dan in her romance blog. I was in the bath. It was a big tub. I expected him to join me, and when he was delayed, I called out, Are you coming? His answer convinced me he was Mr. Right. Yes, but I'm making hors d'oeuvres.
Can you imagine spending the rest of your life without a man like that? Nancy knew how lucky she was. She and Dan entered their 50s together, then their 60s. His hair turned gray, hers turned white. But she told Kim that even after decades of marriage, they had sex every night before they went to bed.
Nancy would be working at her computer writing, and Dan would give her that look. Hey, you want to have sex? And they would have sex, and then she would go back to working. I mean, I was like, Nancy, I really don't want to hear about your sex life. Romance writer meets chef husband. Things probably got very spicy. Here's the thing no one tells you about marriage. Marriage provides you with the best sex of your life.
Learning the ins and outs of what a stranger likes is hard work. The awkward fumbling and the pressure to perform are overcome in a long-term relationship. There are no probing questions asked at the wrong moment like, "Do you like that?" My husband can look at me from across the room and we recognize the other's thoughts.
Each partner plays out our assigned duties and roles so that neither shoulders the entire burden. Life is not perfect, but how can one appreciate happiness without contrast? In the quiet of the night and in the dark of our bedroom, we savor all the happily ever after moments we've had. But this isn't a romance story. It starts with a happily ever after.
But it doesn't end with one.
As soon as Detective Anthony Merrill pulled into the parking lot of the Oregon Culinary Institute, he knew this was going to be a big case. I recall seeing all the students with their chef jackets on, the white jackets, you know, milling around outside, people hysterical, a lot of emotion, a lot of people crying and hugging each other and consoling one another. Media was all around already setting up.
Even in a big crowd, it wasn't hard for Merrill to spot his partner, Detective Darren Posey. He looked a lot like, well, like Merrill. Both detectives were middle-aged, same height, both bald with shaved heads and mustaches. But Posey was new to the homicide detail. He transferred over from robbery just a few months ago, and so far, Merrill had been taking the lead on their cases.
I was kind of looked to, you know, sort of mentor Darren in the homicide way of doing things. But today, it was Posey's turn to be the lead. Merrill joined his partner and got caught up on what they knew so far. That morning, as students arrived for class, they'd found Dan Brophy collapsed in one of the classrooms. They assumed Dan had a heart attack and began giving chest compressions.
It wasn't until they saw the blood on their hands that they realized he had been shot. There was an entire school of people and a whole community of people that knew the victim, cherished the victim. Media vans kept pulling up.
The crime scene tape covered a three-block radius around the school. You know, as a homicide detective, a lot of times our scenes are in the middle of the night and there's nobody there. There's no media. It's three in the morning. Maybe media arrives up a little later, but, you know, this scene was gigantic. Posey looked a little uneasy. I think I would have been nervous, too, just in that moment. But Merrill stuck by his side. Here's our process. Here's what we're going to do. We're just going to take this one step at a time.
Step one was for Posey to inform the victim's widow that her husband had been killed. This was one of the toughest parts of the job. And when Nancy Brophy arrived on the scene and Posey laid eyes on her, it got even harder. Nancy was now in her late 60s. She had big round cheeks and curly white hair.
Posey couldn't tell from looking at her if she knew what had happened. She looked like a nice older lady that, you know, baked cookies for her grandkids. He walked up to Nancy and asked if he could talk to her.
The detectives led Nancy to a cargo van on the side where they were conducting interviews and speaking to witnesses. It's a terrible thing to tell somebody that their loved one is dead and they're never going to see them again. And that's bad in and of itself. Then I have to explain to them that they were murdered. The detectives sat across from Nancy and turned on their tape recorder.
What happened next was just as hard as Posey thought it would be. So, Nancy, I know that I think some people kind of notified you that something was going on. Just what they heard on the news. Oh, okay. So, Dan is your husband, is that correct? Uh-huh. And his name's Daniel? C for Craig, Rosie. Oh, okay. So, I just want to let you know...
you know we we believe you know dan dan we believe it's dan that's that that's okay yeah we just felt a lot of grief for her because you're looking at this woman that is just learning her whole life got turned upside down yeah i'm sorry um anybody that would
that wanted to do something to Dan. - The only people I know who have ever hated him was his ex-wife, and who at check's wife doesn't hate the husband? - Right. - You know, and I can't believe after 25 years she'd be motivated, you know? So yeah, I mean, short of that.
All right. We live a quiet life. So I was going to ask you, does Dan own any kind of guns at all, or does he carry a gun at all for any reason? You're going to be so embarrassed. I'm proud of you. After the Marjory Douglas Stoneman shooting in February... Nancy told them that following a school shooting in Florida the past February, they decided to buy a gun. But when they brought it home... We looked at it.
Detective Posey and I thought, well, you know, your shirt's there now, and she wasn't.
Perhaps Chef Brophy decided to carry the gun on him for some reason that he didn't tell his wife for protection that day, and somebody stole it from him and shot him with his gun. Posey told Nancy that they'd have officers escort her home and check on that gun. We're going to be working real hard on this right now. You know that. But if you need anything... But even if you find who shot him, he's not going to bring it back. And I want...
I want him back. That's the part I want. I don't care about who shot him. I just want him back. I don't want him dead. Darren and I both were choked up. I mean, you know, she wasn't crying, like, hysterically, but you could tell she, like, was sort of in shock. After the interview, one of the detectives led Nancy to her minivan across the street. Another cop followed behind to make sure she got home safe.
While the detectives were talking to Nancy, Dan's mom, Karen Brophy, was waiting by the phone. Earlier that morning, Nancy told her there'd been a shooting at Dan's school. She was supposed to let me know what she found out. Finally, the phone rang. She said it was Dan. And it's the part that's difficult for me because of the fact that I wasn't brave enough to go. I knew I couldn't go down there.
I knew I could not face that. I couldn't, you know, even though I had had the feeling that it could be him, I wasn't willing to face that. The news of Dan's death spread like wildfire.
I wasn't part of Nancy's writing group anymore, but almost everyone who was heard within hours. She's like telling me, pull over, pull over. Kim Wollenberg, Nancy's writing partner, was driving when someone else in the writing group called her up. She told me that there had been a shooting at the school and Dan was dead. Dan had been killed. Just knowing what she was going through, because, you know, she loved him, so I knew everything.
It was, she was going through a lot. I almost, like, I didn't believe it. It didn't make any sense. I was in shock and denial. Eric Stromquist was one of the founders of the culinary school and had been close friends with Dan for more than a decade. It wasn't until the end of the day that it really sunk in that Dan had been murdered and we didn't know who. It was the question all of Dan's friends and loved ones were asking themselves.
Who would murder Dan Brophy? And as Posey began searching through the contents of Dan's phone, he stumbled upon something that made the case even stranger. There were emails, class schedules, the usual mundane stuff.
Then he saw a website in the search history. Ten ways to cover up a murder. Wait, what? I was like, what's that? Why would that be on Daniel's phone? That makes no sense whatsoever. 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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People who don't read a lot of romance are sometimes surprised to learn how many kinds of romance stories there are. There's historical romance, paranormal romance, Amish romance. Yeah, that's a real thing. And then there's the kind of story Nancy wrote, romantic suspense. What makes romantic suspense unique is that while there's a love story developing, there's also a mystery unfolding.
A crime has been committed or someone's in terrible danger. And the pieces of the puzzle have to be put together before time runs out. You can almost hear the ticking clock. Detectives Posey and Merrill were hearing it too. And they had a lot of pieces that didn't fit together. ♪
One of the first things they'd noticed on the scene was that there were no security cameras at the school. Which I thought was odd. I mean, just because of, you know, the amount of stuff that they had in there. It was going to make their job way more challenging. They headed back to the classroom where Dan Brophy's students had found him earlier that morning. When you first walk in, there's all these different apparatus that are in there.
They weaved through the maze of tables and equipment until they got to Dan's body. He was still on his back, wearing his dark chef uniform pants and a jacket over a t-shirt. Merrill crouched down to take a closer look. There were two bullet holes in his body, one on the back and another in the chest.
But... He had no defensive injuries on his hands, his fingernails, anything that you would suspect that maybe he was resisting or fighting with somebody. And there wasn't any sign of a struggle in the room. It didn't look like there was a fight between the chef and anyone. Broken items or things that looked knocked over. The only thing out of place was an ice scoop near Dan on the floor.
Meryl had been told that Dan liked to have coffee and ice water waiting for his students when they arrived.
When his students found him, the kitchen sink was still running. It doesn't take a brilliant person to understand what's going on here. He's working at the sink with his back to whoever's behind him. The killer walked in from behind and shot Dan in the back. He likely collapsed immediately from that first gunshot. And then the killer stood right over Dan as he struggled on the ground.
and shot him again in the chest. And finished him off with that second shot. It was a brutal killing. And the fact that nothing on the scene had been taken made it even more chilling. This didn't look like a robbery gone bad. Dan's wallet still had cash in it. I think it was upwards in the amount of 60-some dollars. He had credit cards, all of his IDs, his truck keys, an iPhone,
Everything was intact. It's more mysterious in a sense, right? Because it's like there's two casings and a dead person and you're like going, oh, what happened here? But the lack of clues... There's no disturbance here, no forced entry. ...was a clue in itself. There was intention. Somebody meant to do this.
While the detectives checked out the crime scene, other officers began canvassing the area, speaking to students who were there that morning. The police had all the students separated. They had taken photos of each student, identified their name. Was there anything going on with Chef Brophy and anybody in this class? Any relationships that seemed unusual? No, he was...
Equally kind to all of us. And specifically, I'll just say it, do you suspect he was having an affair with anybody in your class? Oh, God, no. What about any drug activity between either of them? No, but, um, Glenn could be, he could be, he had a very, how can I describe this? A sense of humor could be very cruel.
It raised another possible theory. Could it have been a student who, you know, was just upset? The students either loved him or hated him. There just wasn't a lot in between. He could, on occasion, rub students the wrong way. Eric Stromquist, the president of the school, had hired Dan after tensions with the student had gotten him fired from a previous school. He was very...
dry and sarcastic and that, you know, occasionally students didn't understand where he was coming from. So there was the vengeful student theory. And then there was another lead developing. More people that, you know, hung out, you know, in the neighborhood. We really, we had a
to shoo people off the front door stoop from time to time or, you know, people rummaging through our garbage and recycling. Dan Brophy had created an outreach program for the homeless folks in the area. He would take the extra food that were no longer going to be used at the Culinary Institute and he would take that and do stuff with his mom and dad's church. Maybe Dan encountered a situation that morning that somehow escalated. If so, there
There could be someone out there with a weapon. As the hours went by, the police started feeling desperate. They knocked on doors, spoke to neighbors, looking for anyone who might have seen or heard something.
We have no eyewitnesses to the incident. We have no information in that vicinity of anybody coming forward to say, hey, you know, we heard a gunshot. We saw a car leave the area or a person run away. Nothing. Zero. Every available officer joined in the canvassing of the area. It was all hands on deck.
Even the prosecutors who'd been assigned to the case were pounding the pavement. It had been now several hours. It's well into lunchtime and none of us had eaten. A few months later, Nicole would be desperately flipping through romance books on the beaches of Croatia. But right now, she was in full work mode, helping the team canvas the neighborhood.
she began walking toward a pizza shop across the street. I remember it smelled wonderful. But that wasn't what made her start walking toward it. The pizza shop had a security camera. It was a real law and order moment as the detectives and the district attorneys piled into the pizza shop's tiny security office.
The senior deputy district attorney, Sean Overstreet, stood in the back, squinting at the monitor. It wasn't the highest quality camera, but it was good enough. They knew Dan Brophy was killed shortly before 7.30 that morning. What we did is we went back to earlier in the morning to see if we could see anything suspicious. Somebody running from the scene, anything like that.
Somebody driving away quickly. Just anything. All eyes stayed glued to the tiny, grainy monitor. Everything seemed to be normal. Every once in a while, somebody would walk by. Random cars driving down the street. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Then, close to the time of the murder, Posey saw something strange. And I was like, oh, wait a second. Earlier that morning, he'd noticed the car Nancy drove. A beat-up silver minivan.
We're looking at the video at that time, and we see a minivan drive by. It looked just like Nancy's. They paused the video. Wait a minute. Maybe the time is really wrong. Nope, it wasn't. We're looking at that, and I'm like going, wow, that's odd, because if that's her van, it shouldn't be there. Because Nancy had told them she had been in bed all morning.
They huddled around the tiny screen and leaned in closer. Just her profile, her age, the clothing. It all seemed that that was Nancy that was driving in that morning. We thought, this doesn't fit. Something is wrong here. A new story was unfolding before their eyes. One that would change the very nature of their investigation.
and blur the line between fact and fiction. Nancy often knew what her ending would be because she was a writer. She just lost her husband. She's got no money coming in. They could take your house. We know she lied about being downtown. Is this enough to arrest her? Asked her point blank. I don't understand this. I said, why are they bringing up this fucking essay you wrote? She goes, I wrote it as a joke. It was supposed to be funny. She just pretty much said, well, you know,
If there's one thing I've learned in 15 years of marriage, you have to treat every day like it might be your last. Anybody ever actually looked at the research I did for my stories, they would think I was a demonologist or a witch. We wanted desperately to believe that there was some homeless mushroom hunting psychomaniac on the loose gunning for chefs. I'm kind of, I'm freaking out at this point. Like I have sold this person a handgun and they're being charged with them.
with the murder. But everyone had a different version. Everyone had a different story. And I don't know how many of her friends, how much they really knew. That's on this season 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 one of six 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 Edboss. 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 Freesound Sync.
Fact-checking by Annika Robbins. Senior Managing Producer is Lata 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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