Wrote an essay before Murdering
Unlike the antagonists in her steamy romance thrillers, author Nancy did not get away with murder. A jury found her guilty Wednesday of second-degree murder in the 2018 death of her husband, chef Daniel, who was gunned down at the culinary school where he taught cooking classes. Nancy, who once wrote a notorious essay titled, "How to Murder Your Husband," showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read in a Portland, Oregon, courtroom.
Prosecutors argued the couple was struggling with debt -- Nancy's self-published novels were not big sellers -- and that his death could have left her with more than $1 million in life insurance policies and other assets. They told jurors that Nancy followed her husband to work and shot him with a Glock 9 mm handgun. Investigators found two 9 mm shell casings at the scene. She had also bought a "ghost gun" assembly kit that investigators later found at a storage facility. "Ghost guns" are unregistered and untraceable firearms.
She was the only person who had a motive to kill her husband, Multnomah County Senior Deputy District Attorney Shawn Over street said in closing arguments this week. "This wasn't working for Nancy," Over street said. "It isn't just about money. It's about the lifestyle that Dan couldn't give to her." Nancy, 71, took the witness stand and rejected that assertion, saying she was better off financially with her husband alive.
She also testified that she couldn't remember all the details from the morning her husband was killed, and that her minivan's sighting near the culinary school that morning was a mere coincidence. On why, she had bought a gun and a ghost-gun kit, she said it was part of research for a new book. "What I can tell you is it was for writing," she said.
"It was not, as you would believe, to murder my husband." The jury didn't buy it. Nancy faces a minimum of 25 years in prison at her sentencing, set for June 13. Nancy's books were tales of attempted murder, lust, crime and infidelity -- all common themes for romantic suspense novels.
In "The Wrong Husband," a woman tries to escape her abusive husband by hiding in Spain during their anniversary trip. "My stories are about pretty men and strong women, about families that don't always work and about the joy of finding love and the difficulty of making it stay," she wrote on her website. Her husband's killing was a plot twist that could have been ripped from one of her books. And when she became a suspect, it was a stunning development for a woman who had portrayed life with her husband of almost two decades as anything but wrong.
The couple lived in a quiet suburb of Portland, where he raised turkeys and chickens, tended a vegetable garden and liked to whip up lavish meals for her. "I'm a flawed person, Dan was a flawed person ... together we made a really good team," she testified. Then came the morning of June 2, 2018, when someone shot Daniel in the kitchen of the Oregon Culinary Institute. Students arrived for class and found him bleeding on the floor.
In court documents, prosecutors said the 63-year-old man had been shot twice -- once in the back as he stood at a sink filling ice and water buckets for the students, and then a second time in the chest at close range. Daniel's wallet with cash and credit cards was found with him, and there were no signs of robbery or forced entry.
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