June 7, 2022 • 38 mins
Beloved chef Daniel Brophy is found shot to the death in the kitchen of the culinary institute where he works. There is no sign of forced entry at the Oregon Culinary Institute Instructor, in fact, the door is locked. Students coming into class that day say it's normal for Brophy to come in early, set up the day's instruction, then open the door to students. On this day, that didn't happen. Another instructor had to open the door and that's when Brophy is found shot twice. Who killed Dan Brophy, and why? Ultimately, police build a circumstantial case against Nancy Crampton Brophy, the chef's wife. Where's the proof?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. Being a New Orleans native.
One of the things that I put a lot of
stock in is fine food. You go a lot of
places and you know you measured that location by the
(00:29):
cuisine they serve. I've been around a lot of chefs
over the course of my life. The story I want
to tell you today has to do with a man
that's spent nearly fifty years not just working in the
kitchen as a chef, but teaching others not just how
to cook, but things like foraging from mushrooms, how to
(00:52):
set of kitchen up, how to make a living with
your hands. Following those things that you really really love
him day, I want to talk about the murder Dan Brophy.
Jackie Howard's with me, the executive producer of Crime Stories
(01:14):
with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what do we have relative to
Dan Brophy in his life? Dan Brothy was a beloved
chef and instructor. His students spoke highly of him. He
worked for the Oregon Culinary Institute in Southwest Portland. He
had been there since two thousand six. Students came into
(01:34):
the school early one morning and found Daniel Brophy dead
shot in the kitchen did not appear to be any
forced entry. The assumption was made that it was a
robbery or attempted robbery, but it took some time for
police to come up with the idea of what they
think actually happened. Daniel Brofy was married to a romance novelist,
(01:59):
Nancy Rampton Brothy. One of the stories that she was
credited with writing is called how to Murder Your Husband
and also the Wrong Husband. Police began their investigation in
the kitchen. How do you start because you have the
location where many people come in and out, and we
all know you cordon off the scene and start there.
(02:19):
But when you have something that that does not appear
to be a a forced entry, Dan Brophy still had
his wallet, his cell phones, and his car keys with him.
What are the things that we're looking for. Dan's practice,
according to you know, all of his colleagues, was to
leave the house early, early in the morning. He would
(02:40):
he'd had out for the culinary school and you know,
sometimes arrive around five thirty. You imagine that, and you
know one of the reasons that you know, I'm a
college professor, it's you know, I don't have to show
up to do that sort of thing. This guy is
a hands on instructor. He he has to make sure
that everything is squared away in the kitchen. Uh, you
know that all of the food stuffs are laid out correctly,
(03:02):
that they have all of the utensils that they're gonna
need that day for the instruction that's going to be ongoing.
And it's a class set up, so it's labor intensive,
it's it's it's remarkable what these guys go through, very
intense learning in this environment. So, you know, when we
think about that that initial theme of five thirty in
(03:26):
the morning, you have to begin to think that if
it didn't happen outside the building, which you would, you know,
think that if somebody's walking from there from their vehicle
to the entrance, that there would be maybe an effort
on the part of the victim initially to fight with
the person if they're if they're being held at the gunpoint,
(03:47):
you know that they know that they're going to be
killed or something like that. There's no evidence of that,
and then there's no evidence that the lock was jimmied
on the door. And here's here's another part to this
is that one of the things that Dan would do. Uh.
You know, in my opening I talked about how he
was a forger. Not only was he a forger, he
(04:09):
was considered by some a master gardener. I don't even
know what goes into that sort of thing, but he
would grow herbs and and one of the things that
we do know about these folks that teach in these
culinary environments, you don't get paid a lot of money,
so they would have side gigs that they would do.
And one of the things that Dan would do is
that he would have a collection of homegrown herbs and
(04:31):
he would kind of bind these things together, I guess,
things like a regundo and sage and all these sorts
of things. And he would sell fresh herbs and he
would put them on a cart. It's like a handcart.
You see teachers using them lots of times. And you
know that cart was actually in the hallway. He had
all of his herbs set up out there and even
had his keys, you know, resting on this cart, which
(04:54):
gives you an indication that he was going about his
normal process. So there's no and someone walked in and
kind of strong armed it, you know, where they're throwing
a gun up in his face and he's doing things
that are outside of the norm. So as an investigator,
when you show up in this environment, you have to
begin to factor these things around, and sometimes the stuff
(05:15):
doesn't come to light until afterwards. You know, the cops
have no way of knowing when they show up at
the scene that his normal activity was to get this
card out with the herbs on it. Maybe he rested
his keys there. Normally that comes after the fact, after
you begin to interview people, so you know immediately you're thinking, well,
was this somebody that actually knew him that perpetrated this
(05:37):
horrible crime. As the police start to interview students who
showed up for class that day, one of the things
that police uncovered is the fact that the door was
still locked. We talked about no forced entry jone. Right
here is the classic tell tale sign the door was
still locked. It was Dan Brophy's routine as you're talking about,
(05:57):
to unlock the door. Were the students as he prepared
for the morning. So as they began to show up
for class that morning on June two, they knew something
was wrong. The students waited for a long time, but
it wasn't until another instructor let the classmates in that
they found Brophy's body. They say he was lying on
(06:21):
the floor by the sink. The water was running and
the lights were on. Students began to try to do cprs.
They made the call to nine one. So what does
all this tell us, Joe, With the fact that the
door was still locked, how did the perpetrator get away?
Just goes to you know, use that word, uh, you know,
(06:43):
kind of uh normal if if you will. And that's
a theme that you'll hear me talk about. I don't
care if people get tired of here. And that's something
that everyone will hear from me. And that's what makes
death investigations so unique and also so horrible is the
act that I'm not talking about us as investigators. I'm
(07:03):
talking about people going about their normal, day to day
business where they are always having to see the abnormal
in the context of the normal, you know, for them,
for those students that walked in and found their instructor, um,
you know, this, this person that they set at his
feet to learn from, you know, laying in this position.
(07:24):
Can you imagine everything that was going through their mind.
They're trying to save their instructor's life. At this point,
they're doing chess compressions and everything, and he was gone
by this time. So whoever it perpetrated this crime had
done it in such a manner that there were no
signs of life left in his body at that moment
in time because he wasn't transported from the scene. They
(07:46):
worked the scene. And that's kind of a big tell
for us and investigations. That means that when ian s
might arrive, they know that there's no hope. So what
does that imply. That implies that there is a specific
mark her in time that has gone out. That means
no signs of even agonal respirations there. You might even
have changes after death at that point the body is
(08:08):
growing cool to the touch. But the question I think
is how did this individual leave the premises without anybody
being aware? How did the door kind of lock behind them? Um,
you know as they were exiting. Is there's some way
to manipulate that lock. And here's another big part to this.
(08:30):
How would they have known to have locked that door
unless they had intimate knowledge of not just Dan's activities
but the environment itself. One of the students who found
Dan Brophy began doing CPR, and she said that his
chest felt squishy her words, squishy. She thought she had
(08:52):
broken his ribs. Now, ultimately we know that he was shot,
So what would be the explanation for that link? Squish
It can arise from a couple of different places. First off,
you have the squishiness. If folks at home will just
imagine a fluid soaked sponge. If you've ever held a
fluid soak sponge, whether it's a bath sponge or you
(09:14):
know one that you keep on the on the sink
when you washing dishes, you know the consistency of that
it's wet and when you compress it, it has kind
of a squishiness to it. Um and that would mean
that the area was potentially very hemorrhagic. We know that
these injuries that Dan sustained went in to his chest.
(09:37):
That's very well documented. And when that happens. When that
happens um, you have something that occurs that's referred to
as plural effusion, which means if you have major organs,
and it doesn't even necessarily have to be a major organ,
you can just clip a vessel and guess what happens.
At that point in time, that open space around the
(09:57):
lungs just begins to fill with blood. There's nowhere for
wor to go. Remember, it's it's no longer in the vessels.
You're bleeding out into this open space. So when she's
doing compressions like this, there could be a squishy feeling. Uh.
And even from bullet defects, you can have blood if
you can. Can you imagine this being a student and
you're doing chest compressions through the defects, You've got blood.
(10:21):
That's kind of it's almost like a font that's coming
up and spraying blood not spraying and sense of arterial spray.
It's not that dynamic, but the area outside of the
body is becoming super saturated with every compression that you do. Now,
another explanation for this is that if in fact, these
(10:41):
rounds were to pass through any of the bony structures,
when you begin to think about the sternal, which is
the large flat bane that's right in the center of
our chest, or the ribs to either side, those are
going to become fractured as well. Uh, just by the
impact of these rounds. Uh, that'll have kind of a
(11:02):
I guess a good way to describe it as a
squishing us to it too, because all of that area
as long as he is still living for a moment
or two, uh becomes uh super infused with hemorrhage around
that area, those those little areas under the skin are
becoming hemorrhagic. So that will lend itself to that as well.
So it's a bloody mess in the literal sense of
(11:24):
that term. I can I feel so sorry for the
student that had been doing this because it was absolutely
a horror show. We talked about this a lot in
(11:50):
death investigation, particularly where homicide is involved, you begin to
think about, you know, who could have been angry enough,
agitate it enough in order to bring an end to
somebody's life. In contrary what you see in even popular
media or in fictionalized novels, it's generally not some stranger
(12:12):
in a dark alley. It's going to be those individuals
that are in our immediate circle. And in this case,
Dan Brothy's wife, Nancy was arrested, yes she was. In fact,
she quickly became the only suspect in this murder. Police
found evidence leading back to Nancy Brophy and in fact,
(12:33):
the first thing which was a strike against her was
the title of her novel, How to Murder Your Husband.
I would have to imagine doing what you do for
a living, and me as well, being a journalist. One
of the things that we both do is ask questions.
When you throw a writer in with a forensics person,
(12:56):
that can be a dangerous combination. You're absolutely right about that.
I'm going to confess something here. I'm going to confess
one of my greatest fears. You don't find people doing
this very often because it shows you being weak. But
I'm gonna confess one of my greatest fears. I've been
involved in forensics and death investigations since I was a
very young man, since I was essentially years old. First
(13:16):
time I've walked on board, and people are always curious.
They're always curious. They they always want to know because
people are generally not around death. And for me, you know,
I inhabited the world of death for years and years
done to fear at what happened. And there any number
of times I've been called speaking public and of course
I do it on air a lot, and I would
(13:37):
go to these writers meetings. They would ask me to
come in and speak, you know, to crime writers want
to be you know, uh, fictional crime writers and that
sort of thing. And there's always that little thing in
the back of my mind where I'm speaking to this
crowd and I they haven't been vetted, uh, And generally
they're there, you know, for their purposes. They want to
(13:58):
know about forensics and kind of how it all works
and this word thing. But there was always that little
thing in the back of my mind, is who exactly
am I educating on this audience? Is there are these
people here to try to learn about the mechanics of
forensics and certainly the science of it, and how they
can create this beautiful narrative where they create some kind
of mystery or do they want something else from me?
(14:22):
Do they want to try to figure out how to
get away with a perfect crime? So in answer to
your question, yeah, it's something that has always kind of
sat in the back of my mind and made me
quite fearful many times. You know, you kind of walk
out of the room after you've talked to him and saying,
maybe I should have said that. But to this, to
that point, I have, I have no evidence yet to uh,
(14:46):
to indicate that I've been in any way implicated in
any kind of almside out there yet. Well. Nancy Brothy's
self published romance How to murder your husband essentially ended
up not being admitted into twinal. The judge ruled that
it would be excluded. But there was lots of other evidence.
There was a timeline that didn't seem to add up
(15:06):
of where Nancy Brophy said she was to the surveillance
video Joe of traffic cameras that showed Nancy Brophy's minivan
in the streets around the institute close to the time
of the shooting. But she says she was nowhere near
the institute. So how did police go about putting all
(15:27):
of these things together to come up with a timeline
of how she could have done it? Yeah, you know,
and in this case, they lived obviously some distance away
from the institution, and you know there's always already one
vehicle that's there, and that's Dan's vehicle that he had
shown up early in the morning, you know, to begin work,
(15:49):
and you've got a very tight one to hear, you'd
have to have intimate knowledge of the comings and goings
not only of Dan. Guess what other population the students
and then Dan's colleagues there's shown up to work. So
when they saw her van, you know, kind of circling
in this area. When they went back and reviewed to
CCTV information it it did not marry up with the
(16:13):
times that she claimed. Um she was not there. I mean,
you know, you you've got a physical uh image of
her driving about moving around, uh shortly after Dan had
come into the location and began to set up for
the day, and you know, we've come to talk about that.
(16:33):
But you know, there were these these other issues that
had come up. She claimed that I think that she
had still remained in bed when Dan had left the house.
She had an awareness that he had left, apparently, but
she contends that she was, you know, in bed writing
that that's you know, we've already talked about how she
was writer. And then there was the issue of feeding
(16:55):
the chickens they kept. They kept chickens on their property there,
which is another kind of little aside relative to to
Dan in the world that he inhabited. Dan, I didn't
even know this kind of thing existed. I guess I
should have. But Dan was regarded as a master poultry
(17:15):
uh preparer, and one of the things about that is
you have to know how to slaughter chickens. And so
they actually had chickens on property there that would be
obviously to furnish eggs, but also to provide meat um
so that you could do dishes with these sorts of things.
So all of that did not marry up with the police,
and you have you have a suspect that is telling
(17:38):
you something that does not marry up with what the
police are sitting there, and I can see them all
sitting around a monitor before they ever approach her about this,
and they're establishing a timeline that's marrying up because you know,
every one of the cctv UH cameras as it's being recorded,
it's documenting that time over and over and against second
(18:00):
by second more working in linear time. And if you
go back and you begin to question a suspect in
this particular case, you know that there is it is
an empirical impossibility for her to have been in two
places at one time. In this case, she apparently was
riding around, scoping out the area, measuring the area for
who may or may not be there was Dan there
(18:21):
by myself. As that moment tim she apparently chose to strike.
Another very important piece of evidence that came into play
here was money. Money always seems to be a top
motivator from what we've seen covering cases for a very
long time now, and what we find out is that
Nancy Crampton Brophy had taken out life insurance policies on
(18:42):
her husband's name. Now, in general that's not you know,
most wives and husbands have insurance policies on each other.
But we find out that she took out ten different
life insurance policies in her husband's name that would give
her at his death more than a million dollars. So
(19:03):
what we find out is that Nancy Brokefy was in
money trouble. So many times we find out these cases
are rooted and financial gain and uh, you know, as
a financial investigator, if you if you bring somebody into
the case that that does forensic accounting for instance, and
has a real feel for numbers um particularly in the
(19:23):
world of insurance and those sorts of things they do,
they can run a balance sheet essentially. And it's kind
of an oversimplistic way of putting this, but you have
to understand, you know, how much is your life actually
valued at and your properties? You know, one of the
reasons that you that you have an insurance policy is
you want to make sure that your loved ones are
(19:44):
taken care of. But if you have, like for instance,
outstanding debts, particularly the biggest one in our life is
generally our mortgage, do you have sufficient amount of funds
to cover that, you know, say one lump sum that's
given to you and you can cover. But this, this
far exceeded what they're in to what there what their
balance sheet as a couple, blide it was. You know,
(20:07):
this is so far over the top that you have
to begin to understand that she's attempting to pay off debt.
And the sad part about it is that because she
put together these insurance policies and I think you had
mentioned that there were upwards of ten that she had
taken off that that's a huge red flag for investigators. Now,
(20:30):
like you said, it doesn't necessarily make you guilty of homicide,
but it is a circumstantial element, and a lot of
this case is circumstantials will get to it's a circumstantial
element that goes in to put together this entire piece
that we're looking about, the life that they lived, and
(20:51):
that's that's what this is all about. When you begin
to think, you know, we talked about the forensics of
it relative to the gunshot one's in the condition the scene,
but what is what are those factors leading up to
what's the motivation behind ending Dan's life. So we've laid
out an investigation here, we have a timeline that doesn't match,
we have a computer forensics timeline, we have money difficulties,
(21:17):
and then we come down to the last piece of
circumstantial evidence and that is a gun. One of the
(21:47):
biggest elements that comes about in a homicide is I
would imagine for the perpetrators they have to decide how
they're going to go about it. And I'm not talking
about Tommy and I'm not talking about are they going
to be able to have access to their to their target.
I'm talking about how are they going to go about it?
How are they going to bring about the end of
(22:08):
somebody's life, What tool are they going to use? And
we cover a lot of things here. We talked about
blunt force injuries, we talked about sharp force injuries, we
talked about boy's names sometimes, but in this case, there
was very unique weapon that was involved in this case,
clock seventeen and the clock nineteen and a ghost gun.
(22:29):
Lots of things to uncover their job. But we're gonna
start back with the computer. In that Nancy Crimpton Brophy
research two guns online and then she purchased a gun
at a gun show. Now, her attorneys explained that Brophy
was working on a book about a woman who basically
(22:49):
got revenge on an abusive partner by killing him with
a gun assembled from pieces bought online, and in order
to make her story believable, Nancy Brophy had to be
able to do this and understand how to do this
to make her story credible. First off, Joe, how do
(23:10):
you do that? Why do you do that? And then
we'll get into a ghost gun. You know, one of
the things that we look for in forensics, UM are
what we referred to as ballistic signatures, and that is
and if our listeners would just you know, think about
those things that make us unique. Uh, it's a principal
in forensics that we refer to as individualization. And this
(23:32):
goes to the implements that are used in in perpetration
of a homicide. UM. You know, we began to think
about fingerprints, we begin to think about pattern injuries that
come about is being struck with some kind of blunt
force objects like a hammer. In this case, we're talking
about firearms, This ballistic fingerprint that comes down the line
(23:53):
um every barrel, if you will, every firing pin, every
extractor on a weapon leaves behind a definitive signature on
either an expended casing, which is in a semi automatic weapon,
(24:14):
it's that soft metal casing that is ejected out of
the port that's left behind by the extractor marks. And
of course, as the projectile is traveling down the barrel,
it kind of expands out in the barrel because of
the heat and the explosion that takes place, that little
miniature explosion, and it expands out into what were referred
to as the lands and grooves, which are the spiraling
(24:36):
features inside of the barrel that are actually um manufactured
in there, and it the spiraling creates stability in the
in the in the projectile. It also maintains power. You know,
years ago you had muskets that weren't rifled. Rifling, these
(24:56):
lands and grooves maintain that energy, so you have much
more power upon delivery as it exits. But the tradeoff
with this is that these spirals in there are unique
to individual weapons. And I'll give you an example. If
we if we have a weapon that comes from manufacturer
a and it's say a nine millimeter, and they make,
(25:20):
say three weapons in a run. Guess what each ballistic
signature of that three, even though they're manufactured at the
same time, is going to be unique to that weapon,
And much more so after those weapons make it make
their way out into the hands of individuals that purchase them,
(25:44):
that signature becomes more unique. And it's depended upon how
well you take care of the weapon, if you clean it,
what type of ammunition you're pushing through it, um and
also just day to day bumping around, and that can
impact the listic signature that's left behind. So every weapon
is unique. And that's one of the things that we
(26:06):
look for when we recover projectiles from bodies or say
that are embedded, and say that have passed through a
body and they embed themselves into walls or floors. We're
going there carefully extract those projectiles so that we can
look at the impressions that are left along the shaft
of this of this projectile and test fired through the
suspected weapon and see if those lands and grooves match up. Now,
(26:29):
there's one more piece that I talked about here. Something
else that is unique to a weapon is the firing
pin impression, and that is it almost looks like a
nail if you think about a firing pin and you're
talking about the tip of it as the weapon is
charged essentially in order to fire, you know, kind of
cocked if you will. The weapon is cocked, and that
(26:51):
firing pin slams forward on the base of every one
of these bullets, intact and munition. There is what's called
a primer cap that's at the base. It's right in
the center. It's it looks like a bull's eye, and microscopically,
did you know that you can actually marry up the
tip of a firing pin to the strike point in
(27:16):
the center of that primary cap, and it is unique
to that firing pin. So you've got several points along
the way where you can match these things up. But
is that still possible given the fact that Nancy Brothy
bought multiple interchangeable parts for this gun. That's that's the
(27:39):
problem if you if you buy in this case, there
was a glock, which is a particular manufacturing. People hear
about it in the media all the time and an
entertainment you know, you hear about a glock weapon which
is an Austrian made weapon. She had a Clock seventeen
and she had a Clock nine. Team. Now they're both
(28:01):
nine millimeter weapons, which is the type of ammunition that's used.
And so the interesting thing about these two weapons is
that you can, even though they're different models. The seventeen
is actually longer than the nineteen, you can actually use
parts from the seventeen in the nineteen and kind of
(28:22):
vice versa on a limited a limited basis. However, However,
if you go out independently after having purchased these two
factory made weapons, you get into this weird world that's
referred to as the ghost gun environment. And you know,
(28:44):
for folks that don't understand what a ghost gun is,
this is an after market adaptation that you can go
out and purchase. Um, some people refer to them as
homemade guns, but they're available out there. They've been a
lable for years and years. And let me kind of
tell you how this works. If you think about a
(29:05):
semi automatic weapon such as in the Glock seventeen, it
has a slide on top of it, and you may
have seen this in movies where people will charge the
weapon by pulling the slide back and then it slams forward. Well,
when you pull that slide back, what you're doing is
in a very simplistic way, I'll just use this, because
(29:28):
the glock doesn't have a hammer, like an external hammer,
you're essentially cocking that weapon. Now, what happens is if
you buy a ghost gun, and in this case we're
talking about a barrel and a slide, you take the
manufactured barrel and slide off of the weapon. Okay, you
put it aside, and you take your ghost gun, which
(29:51):
fits the same frame, and you slide it on top.
And remember how I talked about earlier that these barrels
create unique signatures, Okay, unique signatures that are unique to
those particular barrels. Well, when you pump around through that thing,
you take the slide off of it, you take the
(30:12):
barrel off of it, which are the ghost gun, if
you will, and you put the factory the factory made
slide and barrel back on it. No one's gonna be
the wiser. You take the ghost gun parts. And I
don't know, I've been to Portland's. Portland's right by the
Pacific Ocean. You take that thing and you throw it
out there as far as you can, because at this point,
(30:34):
when the ballistic examination was done on both the seventeen
and the nineteen. They couldn't tie it back to either
one of those barrels. And this all comes down to
digital forensics because the police believe the police believe that
Nancy went on eBay, of all places, and purchased a
(30:56):
ghost gun. So this brings us back to that firing
pin that you were talking think about just a moment ago, Joe.
They were not able to match that strike. Yeah, they're not.
And this is what's and I can only imagine for
firearms examiner. Some people refer to them as a ballistics
ballistic scientists and firearms examination. Um. I can only imagine
(31:21):
their frustration because they've got two cases. Remember Dan was
shot twice. His injuries were essentially uh in in the chest, okay,
and in the back. And here's a little something that
people might not know that don't deal in a world
of anatomy the way I do. We have both um
(31:42):
an anterior chest and a posterior chest. Physicians, when they're
doing an examination and autopsy, they generally don't say back,
they'll say posterior chest because they all kind of communicate
with one another. So for for our purposes, here, we'll
say he was shot in the anterior and posterior chest
at two rounds that that entered his body. They actually
(32:04):
recovered they actually recovered the spint casings. And can you
imagine the frustration that when they get there, uh and
they recover these casings, the police are probably thinking, oh, wow,
we've recovered the casings. The perpetrator of the person that
perpetrated this crime didn't stay around long enough to collect them,
and then they ride off into the sunset. No, they
(32:24):
left him behind. That's a big piece of evidence, and
it's something that when you're um an investigator and you're
working on unsold thomaside, that's one box you can tick
automatically say, oh, my gosh, we've got recovered casings at
the scene. That means that if we can get our
hands on a suspected weapon, we can pair that up
because we're looking at extraction marks, which when that slide
(32:47):
goes back in the process of firing, there's these extractors
that pull that pull these rounds out or pull the
spint casing out and it ejects it and they leave
these little strations on the side of the case. In
and strations is just a fancy term for little linear
marks that are on there, but they are unique to
(33:08):
a particular weapon. Okay, that is extractors contained within that slide.
They also couldn't match up the firing pin in this case,
again contained within the slide. And when you look at
the base of that bullet right there on that primer
cap and you look at it microscopically, it's when you
for people that are not familiar with microscopes, and you
(33:29):
know when you do comparison microscopes in the ballistic lab.
You begin to look down, uh, the the ocular viewer
and you can see down the long axis and you're
looking at that dented primer cap and it has features
like the moon that are unique, that are unique to
that particular event. And can you imagine they're test firing
(33:52):
it with similar ammunition and they're not generating the same
thing every time, so their frustration is really high. So
at at the close all they could do is put
this together circumstantially. Now, the interesting thing about a glock
weapon is that, out of all the other weapons that
are out there, glocks are unique, um and particularly from
(34:15):
years back, depending upon what generation of glock you bought,
they're the first weapon. A lot of people don't know this.
They're the first weapon that is actually formed out of
a plastic mold, and they're made with polymers which makes
them very very light. Their characteristics are unique. So when
you're looking at general classification as a ballistic scientist and
(34:35):
you're examined the thing, you can generally categorize the extraction marks.
You can generally categorize the rifling marks that are left
behind on a projectile, and even the firing pin marks,
and say, Okay, I might not know which glock this
came from, but I do know it came from a
glock as opposed to Smith and Wesson or a Ruger
(34:55):
or h K or a six hour or whatever you're
looking at. Know that this came from a clock, but
they just couldn't match it up to a specific one.
How technically apt do you need to be to be
able to assemble these gun parts to make a working gun.
We know that Nancy Brophy bought ghost gun parts online
(35:20):
and then she also bought a slide and barrel to
fit the glock that she already had. So how much
knowledge do you need to be able to make this
a working gun? I'll sum this up by making this
one statement, do you have a computer and do you
have access to YouTube? That's how simple it is. And
with about a fifteen minute tutorial you can learn how
(35:43):
to break down their whole categories within YouTube that teach
you how to clean a glock weapon. Any number of
the platforms that are out there the glock has created,
you can go and put in that particular type of clock.
And part of cleaning weapon is you have to break
the weapon down. Okay, so within about fifteen minutes you
can change it in and out. And I'm I'm sure
(36:05):
that you know. When she's planning this thing, she's you know,
she's saying, eureka, you know, because she bought this, this
ghost gun, if you will, and she already has these
two other platforms, and she looks at this thing and
she says, okay, well, everything's writing on this. You know,
all her quote unquote research is writing on this. She's
watched YouTube video. She sat there, she disassembles the manufacturer
(36:29):
made weapon, grabs that those ghosts elements, plots it on there,
charges the weapon and she looks at it and she
can dry fire it, and she knows right then her
task is accomplished and all it takes now is for
and I don't know that she did this, but all
it would take now is for her to go to
a firing range or somewhere out in the wilderness and
pop off a few rounds to get comfortable with this thing,
(36:51):
just to make sure that it works, just so that
she has maybe a fail safe in place, because I
don't know if she may have shown up with a
backup weapon. Remember she had two clocks. But it's very
easy to do. It's not like she has to be
even a gunsmith in order to do this. I think
that anybody that has access to the Internet could make
this happen very very easily. And I gotta tell you
(37:14):
it's a unique approach on her part to alibi herself
by saying that this was part of research, because again
back to what I said earlier about being fearful who's
out in the audience. It terrifies me. The slide and
barrel that Nancy Brothy bought online were never recovered, so
(37:36):
that basically means that there's no way to make an
identical match of the weapon that killed Dan Brophy, Right,
you are about that and not I would think that
if her case were to come up on. If her
case were ever to come up on appeal, one of
the major points of appeal could potentially be could potentially
(37:59):
be the circumstantial nature of the ballistics with this, because
there was no way that they could put that weapon
into her hand, firing that weapon and generating those unique
markings on those projectiles that brought Dan's life to an end.
I think that for me, that's that could be a
(38:20):
major point of contention on the part of her defense
team if they choose to move forward, uh with you know,
with with an appeal in her particular case, I think
that that would make it unique. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is Body Backs
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. Being a New Orleans native.
One of the things that I put a lot of
stock in is fine food. You go a lot of
places and you know you measured that location by the
(00:29):
cuisine they serve. I've been around a lot of chefs
over the course of my life. The story I want
to tell you today has to do with a man
that's spent nearly fifty years not just working in the
kitchen as a chef, but teaching others not just how
to cook, but things like foraging from mushrooms, how to
(00:52):
set of kitchen up, how to make a living with
your hands. Following those things that you really really love
him day, I want to talk about the murder Dan Brophy.
Jackie Howard's with me, the executive producer of Crime Stories
(01:14):
with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what do we have relative to
Dan Brophy in his life? Dan Brothy was a beloved
chef and instructor. His students spoke highly of him. He
worked for the Oregon Culinary Institute in Southwest Portland. He
had been there since two thousand six. Students came into
(01:34):
the school early one morning and found Daniel Brophy dead
shot in the kitchen did not appear to be any
forced entry. The assumption was made that it was a
robbery or attempted robbery, but it took some time for
police to come up with the idea of what they
think actually happened. Daniel Brofy was married to a romance novelist,
(01:59):
Nancy Rampton Brothy. One of the stories that she was
credited with writing is called how to Murder Your Husband
and also the Wrong Husband. Police began their investigation in
the kitchen. How do you start because you have the
location where many people come in and out, and we
all know you cordon off the scene and start there.
(02:19):
But when you have something that that does not appear
to be a a forced entry, Dan Brophy still had
his wallet, his cell phones, and his car keys with him.
What are the things that we're looking for. Dan's practice,
according to you know, all of his colleagues, was to
leave the house early, early in the morning. He would
(02:40):
he'd had out for the culinary school and you know,
sometimes arrive around five thirty. You imagine that, and you
know one of the reasons that you know, I'm a
college professor, it's you know, I don't have to show
up to do that sort of thing. This guy is
a hands on instructor. He he has to make sure
that everything is squared away in the kitchen. Uh, you
know that all of the food stuffs are laid out correctly,
(03:02):
that they have all of the utensils that they're gonna
need that day for the instruction that's going to be ongoing.
And it's a class set up, so it's labor intensive,
it's it's it's remarkable what these guys go through, very
intense learning in this environment. So, you know, when we
think about that that initial theme of five thirty in
(03:26):
the morning, you have to begin to think that if
it didn't happen outside the building, which you would, you know,
think that if somebody's walking from there from their vehicle
to the entrance, that there would be maybe an effort
on the part of the victim initially to fight with
the person if they're if they're being held at the gunpoint,
(03:47):
you know that they know that they're going to be
killed or something like that. There's no evidence of that,
and then there's no evidence that the lock was jimmied
on the door. And here's here's another part to this
is that one of the things that Dan would do. Uh.
You know, in my opening I talked about how he
was a forger. Not only was he a forger, he
(04:09):
was considered by some a master gardener. I don't even
know what goes into that sort of thing, but he
would grow herbs and and one of the things that
we do know about these folks that teach in these
culinary environments, you don't get paid a lot of money,
so they would have side gigs that they would do.
And one of the things that Dan would do is
that he would have a collection of homegrown herbs and
(04:31):
he would kind of bind these things together, I guess,
things like a regundo and sage and all these sorts
of things. And he would sell fresh herbs and he
would put them on a cart. It's like a handcart.
You see teachers using them lots of times. And you
know that cart was actually in the hallway. He had
all of his herbs set up out there and even
had his keys, you know, resting on this cart, which
(04:54):
gives you an indication that he was going about his
normal process. So there's no and someone walked in and
kind of strong armed it, you know, where they're throwing
a gun up in his face and he's doing things
that are outside of the norm. So as an investigator,
when you show up in this environment, you have to
begin to factor these things around, and sometimes the stuff
(05:15):
doesn't come to light until afterwards. You know, the cops
have no way of knowing when they show up at
the scene that his normal activity was to get this
card out with the herbs on it. Maybe he rested
his keys there. Normally that comes after the fact, after
you begin to interview people, so you know immediately you're thinking, well,
was this somebody that actually knew him that perpetrated this
(05:37):
horrible crime. As the police start to interview students who
showed up for class that day, one of the things
that police uncovered is the fact that the door was
still locked. We talked about no forced entry jone. Right
here is the classic tell tale sign the door was
still locked. It was Dan Brophy's routine as you're talking about,
(05:57):
to unlock the door. Were the students as he prepared
for the morning. So as they began to show up
for class that morning on June two, they knew something
was wrong. The students waited for a long time, but
it wasn't until another instructor let the classmates in that
they found Brophy's body. They say he was lying on
(06:21):
the floor by the sink. The water was running and
the lights were on. Students began to try to do cprs.
They made the call to nine one. So what does
all this tell us, Joe, With the fact that the
door was still locked, how did the perpetrator get away?
Just goes to you know, use that word, uh, you know,
(06:43):
kind of uh normal if if you will. And that's
a theme that you'll hear me talk about. I don't
care if people get tired of here. And that's something
that everyone will hear from me. And that's what makes
death investigations so unique and also so horrible is the
act that I'm not talking about us as investigators. I'm
(07:03):
talking about people going about their normal, day to day
business where they are always having to see the abnormal
in the context of the normal, you know, for them,
for those students that walked in and found their instructor, um,
you know, this, this person that they set at his
feet to learn from, you know, laying in this position.
(07:24):
Can you imagine everything that was going through their mind.
They're trying to save their instructor's life. At this point,
they're doing chess compressions and everything, and he was gone
by this time. So whoever it perpetrated this crime had
done it in such a manner that there were no
signs of life left in his body at that moment
in time because he wasn't transported from the scene. They
(07:46):
worked the scene. And that's kind of a big tell
for us and investigations. That means that when ian s
might arrive, they know that there's no hope. So what
does that imply. That implies that there is a specific
mark her in time that has gone out. That means
no signs of even agonal respirations there. You might even
have changes after death at that point the body is
(08:08):
growing cool to the touch. But the question I think
is how did this individual leave the premises without anybody
being aware? How did the door kind of lock behind them? Um,
you know as they were exiting. Is there's some way
to manipulate that lock. And here's another big part to this.
(08:30):
How would they have known to have locked that door
unless they had intimate knowledge of not just Dan's activities
but the environment itself. One of the students who found
Dan Brophy began doing CPR, and she said that his
chest felt squishy her words, squishy. She thought she had
(08:52):
broken his ribs. Now, ultimately we know that he was shot,
So what would be the explanation for that link? Squish
It can arise from a couple of different places. First off,
you have the squishiness. If folks at home will just
imagine a fluid soaked sponge. If you've ever held a
fluid soak sponge, whether it's a bath sponge or you
(09:14):
know one that you keep on the on the sink
when you washing dishes, you know the consistency of that
it's wet and when you compress it, it has kind
of a squishiness to it. Um and that would mean
that the area was potentially very hemorrhagic. We know that
these injuries that Dan sustained went in to his chest.
(09:37):
That's very well documented. And when that happens. When that
happens um, you have something that occurs that's referred to
as plural effusion, which means if you have major organs,
and it doesn't even necessarily have to be a major organ,
you can just clip a vessel and guess what happens.
At that point in time, that open space around the
(09:57):
lungs just begins to fill with blood. There's nowhere for
wor to go. Remember, it's it's no longer in the vessels.
You're bleeding out into this open space. So when she's
doing compressions like this, there could be a squishy feeling. Uh.
And even from bullet defects, you can have blood if
you can. Can you imagine this being a student and
you're doing chest compressions through the defects, You've got blood.
(10:21):
That's kind of it's almost like a font that's coming
up and spraying blood not spraying and sense of arterial spray.
It's not that dynamic, but the area outside of the
body is becoming super saturated with every compression that you do. Now,
another explanation for this is that if in fact, these
(10:41):
rounds were to pass through any of the bony structures,
when you begin to think about the sternal, which is
the large flat bane that's right in the center of
our chest, or the ribs to either side, those are
going to become fractured as well. Uh, just by the
impact of these rounds. Uh, that'll have kind of a
(11:02):
I guess a good way to describe it as a
squishing us to it too, because all of that area
as long as he is still living for a moment
or two, uh becomes uh super infused with hemorrhage around
that area, those those little areas under the skin are
becoming hemorrhagic. So that will lend itself to that as well.
So it's a bloody mess in the literal sense of
(11:24):
that term. I can I feel so sorry for the
student that had been doing this because it was absolutely
a horror show. We talked about this a lot in
(11:50):
death investigation, particularly where homicide is involved, you begin to
think about, you know, who could have been angry enough,
agitate it enough in order to bring an end to
somebody's life. In contrary what you see in even popular
media or in fictionalized novels, it's generally not some stranger
(12:12):
in a dark alley. It's going to be those individuals
that are in our immediate circle. And in this case,
Dan Brothy's wife, Nancy was arrested, yes she was. In fact,
she quickly became the only suspect in this murder. Police
found evidence leading back to Nancy Brophy and in fact,
(12:33):
the first thing which was a strike against her was
the title of her novel, How to Murder Your Husband.
I would have to imagine doing what you do for
a living, and me as well, being a journalist. One
of the things that we both do is ask questions.
When you throw a writer in with a forensics person,
(12:56):
that can be a dangerous combination. You're absolutely right about that.
I'm going to confess something here. I'm going to confess
one of my greatest fears. You don't find people doing
this very often because it shows you being weak. But
I'm gonna confess one of my greatest fears. I've been
involved in forensics and death investigations since I was a
very young man, since I was essentially years old. First
(13:16):
time I've walked on board, and people are always curious.
They're always curious. They they always want to know because
people are generally not around death. And for me, you know,
I inhabited the world of death for years and years
done to fear at what happened. And there any number
of times I've been called speaking public and of course
I do it on air a lot, and I would
(13:37):
go to these writers meetings. They would ask me to
come in and speak, you know, to crime writers want
to be you know, uh, fictional crime writers and that
sort of thing. And there's always that little thing in
the back of my mind where I'm speaking to this
crowd and I they haven't been vetted, uh, And generally
they're there, you know, for their purposes. They want to
(13:58):
know about forensics and kind of how it all works
and this word thing. But there was always that little
thing in the back of my mind, is who exactly
am I educating on this audience? Is there are these
people here to try to learn about the mechanics of
forensics and certainly the science of it, and how they
can create this beautiful narrative where they create some kind
of mystery or do they want something else from me?
(14:22):
Do they want to try to figure out how to
get away with a perfect crime? So in answer to
your question, yeah, it's something that has always kind of
sat in the back of my mind and made me
quite fearful many times. You know, you kind of walk
out of the room after you've talked to him and saying,
maybe I should have said that. But to this, to
that point, I have, I have no evidence yet to uh,
(14:46):
to indicate that I've been in any way implicated in
any kind of almside out there yet. Well. Nancy Brothy's
self published romance How to murder your husband essentially ended
up not being admitted into twinal. The judge ruled that
it would be excluded. But there was lots of other evidence.
There was a timeline that didn't seem to add up
(15:06):
of where Nancy Brophy said she was to the surveillance
video Joe of traffic cameras that showed Nancy Brophy's minivan
in the streets around the institute close to the time
of the shooting. But she says she was nowhere near
the institute. So how did police go about putting all
(15:27):
of these things together to come up with a timeline
of how she could have done it? Yeah, you know,
and in this case, they lived obviously some distance away
from the institution, and you know there's always already one
vehicle that's there, and that's Dan's vehicle that he had
shown up early in the morning, you know, to begin work,
(15:49):
and you've got a very tight one to hear, you'd
have to have intimate knowledge of the comings and goings
not only of Dan. Guess what other population the students
and then Dan's colleagues there's shown up to work. So
when they saw her van, you know, kind of circling
in this area. When they went back and reviewed to
CCTV information it it did not marry up with the
(16:13):
times that she claimed. Um she was not there. I mean,
you know, you you've got a physical uh image of
her driving about moving around, uh shortly after Dan had
come into the location and began to set up for
the day, and you know, we've come to talk about that.
(16:33):
But you know, there were these these other issues that
had come up. She claimed that I think that she
had still remained in bed when Dan had left the house.
She had an awareness that he had left, apparently, but
she contends that she was, you know, in bed writing
that that's you know, we've already talked about how she
was writer. And then there was the issue of feeding
(16:55):
the chickens they kept. They kept chickens on their property there,
which is another kind of little aside relative to to
Dan in the world that he inhabited. Dan, I didn't
even know this kind of thing existed. I guess I
should have. But Dan was regarded as a master poultry
(17:15):
uh preparer, and one of the things about that is
you have to know how to slaughter chickens. And so
they actually had chickens on property there that would be
obviously to furnish eggs, but also to provide meat um
so that you could do dishes with these sorts of things.
So all of that did not marry up with the police,
and you have you have a suspect that is telling
(17:38):
you something that does not marry up with what the
police are sitting there, and I can see them all
sitting around a monitor before they ever approach her about this,
and they're establishing a timeline that's marrying up because you know,
every one of the cctv UH cameras as it's being recorded,
it's documenting that time over and over and against second
(18:00):
by second more working in linear time. And if you
go back and you begin to question a suspect in
this particular case, you know that there is it is
an empirical impossibility for her to have been in two
places at one time. In this case, she apparently was
riding around, scoping out the area, measuring the area for
who may or may not be there was Dan there
(18:21):
by myself. As that moment tim she apparently chose to strike.
Another very important piece of evidence that came into play
here was money. Money always seems to be a top
motivator from what we've seen covering cases for a very
long time now, and what we find out is that
Nancy Crampton Brophy had taken out life insurance policies on
(18:42):
her husband's name. Now, in general that's not you know,
most wives and husbands have insurance policies on each other.
But we find out that she took out ten different
life insurance policies in her husband's name that would give
her at his death more than a million dollars. So
(19:03):
what we find out is that Nancy Brokefy was in
money trouble. So many times we find out these cases
are rooted and financial gain and uh, you know, as
a financial investigator, if you if you bring somebody into
the case that that does forensic accounting for instance, and
has a real feel for numbers um particularly in the
(19:23):
world of insurance and those sorts of things they do,
they can run a balance sheet essentially. And it's kind
of an oversimplistic way of putting this, but you have
to understand, you know, how much is your life actually
valued at and your properties? You know, one of the
reasons that you that you have an insurance policy is
you want to make sure that your loved ones are
(19:44):
taken care of. But if you have, like for instance,
outstanding debts, particularly the biggest one in our life is
generally our mortgage, do you have sufficient amount of funds
to cover that, you know, say one lump sum that's
given to you and you can cover. But this, this
far exceeded what they're in to what there what their
balance sheet as a couple, blide it was. You know,
(20:07):
this is so far over the top that you have
to begin to understand that she's attempting to pay off debt.
And the sad part about it is that because she
put together these insurance policies and I think you had
mentioned that there were upwards of ten that she had
taken off that that's a huge red flag for investigators. Now,
(20:30):
like you said, it doesn't necessarily make you guilty of homicide,
but it is a circumstantial element, and a lot of
this case is circumstantials will get to it's a circumstantial
element that goes in to put together this entire piece
that we're looking about, the life that they lived, and
(20:51):
that's that's what this is all about. When you begin
to think, you know, we talked about the forensics of
it relative to the gunshot one's in the condition the scene,
but what is what are those factors leading up to
what's the motivation behind ending Dan's life. So we've laid
out an investigation here, we have a timeline that doesn't match,
we have a computer forensics timeline, we have money difficulties,
(21:17):
and then we come down to the last piece of
circumstantial evidence and that is a gun. One of the
(21:47):
biggest elements that comes about in a homicide is I
would imagine for the perpetrators they have to decide how
they're going to go about it. And I'm not talking
about Tommy and I'm not talking about are they going
to be able to have access to their to their target.
I'm talking about how are they going to go about it?
How are they going to bring about the end of
(22:08):
somebody's life, What tool are they going to use? And
we cover a lot of things here. We talked about
blunt force injuries, we talked about sharp force injuries, we
talked about boy's names sometimes, but in this case, there
was very unique weapon that was involved in this case,
clock seventeen and the clock nineteen and a ghost gun.
(22:29):
Lots of things to uncover their job. But we're gonna
start back with the computer. In that Nancy Crimpton Brophy
research two guns online and then she purchased a gun
at a gun show. Now, her attorneys explained that Brophy
was working on a book about a woman who basically
(22:49):
got revenge on an abusive partner by killing him with
a gun assembled from pieces bought online, and in order
to make her story believable, Nancy Brophy had to be
able to do this and understand how to do this
to make her story credible. First off, Joe, how do
(23:10):
you do that? Why do you do that? And then
we'll get into a ghost gun. You know, one of
the things that we look for in forensics, UM are
what we referred to as ballistic signatures, and that is
and if our listeners would just you know, think about
those things that make us unique. Uh, it's a principal
in forensics that we refer to as individualization. And this
(23:32):
goes to the implements that are used in in perpetration
of a homicide. UM. You know, we began to think
about fingerprints, we begin to think about pattern injuries that
come about is being struck with some kind of blunt
force objects like a hammer. In this case, we're talking
about firearms, This ballistic fingerprint that comes down the line
(23:53):
um every barrel, if you will, every firing pin, every
extractor on a weapon leaves behind a definitive signature on
either an expended casing, which is in a semi automatic weapon,
(24:14):
it's that soft metal casing that is ejected out of
the port that's left behind by the extractor marks. And
of course, as the projectile is traveling down the barrel,
it kind of expands out in the barrel because of
the heat and the explosion that takes place, that little
miniature explosion, and it expands out into what were referred
to as the lands and grooves, which are the spiraling
(24:36):
features inside of the barrel that are actually um manufactured
in there, and it the spiraling creates stability in the
in the in the projectile. It also maintains power. You know,
years ago you had muskets that weren't rifled. Rifling, these
(24:56):
lands and grooves maintain that energy, so you have much
more power upon delivery as it exits. But the tradeoff
with this is that these spirals in there are unique
to individual weapons. And I'll give you an example. If
we if we have a weapon that comes from manufacturer
a and it's say a nine millimeter, and they make,
(25:20):
say three weapons in a run. Guess what each ballistic
signature of that three, even though they're manufactured at the
same time, is going to be unique to that weapon,
And much more so after those weapons make it make
their way out into the hands of individuals that purchase them,
(25:44):
that signature becomes more unique. And it's depended upon how
well you take care of the weapon, if you clean it,
what type of ammunition you're pushing through it, um and
also just day to day bumping around, and that can
impact the listic signature that's left behind. So every weapon
is unique. And that's one of the things that we
(26:06):
look for when we recover projectiles from bodies or say
that are embedded, and say that have passed through a
body and they embed themselves into walls or floors. We're
going there carefully extract those projectiles so that we can
look at the impressions that are left along the shaft
of this of this projectile and test fired through the
suspected weapon and see if those lands and grooves match up. Now,
(26:29):
there's one more piece that I talked about here. Something
else that is unique to a weapon is the firing
pin impression, and that is it almost looks like a
nail if you think about a firing pin and you're
talking about the tip of it as the weapon is
charged essentially in order to fire, you know, kind of
cocked if you will. The weapon is cocked, and that
(26:51):
firing pin slams forward on the base of every one
of these bullets, intact and munition. There is what's called
a primer cap that's at the base. It's right in
the center. It's it looks like a bull's eye, and microscopically,
did you know that you can actually marry up the
tip of a firing pin to the strike point in
(27:16):
the center of that primary cap, and it is unique
to that firing pin. So you've got several points along
the way where you can match these things up. But
is that still possible given the fact that Nancy Brothy
bought multiple interchangeable parts for this gun. That's that's the
(27:39):
problem if you if you buy in this case, there
was a glock, which is a particular manufacturing. People hear
about it in the media all the time and an
entertainment you know, you hear about a glock weapon which
is an Austrian made weapon. She had a Clock seventeen
and she had a Clock nine. Team. Now they're both
(28:01):
nine millimeter weapons, which is the type of ammunition that's used.
And so the interesting thing about these two weapons is
that you can, even though they're different models. The seventeen
is actually longer than the nineteen, you can actually use
parts from the seventeen in the nineteen and kind of
(28:22):
vice versa on a limited a limited basis. However, However,
if you go out independently after having purchased these two
factory made weapons, you get into this weird world that's
referred to as the ghost gun environment. And you know,
(28:44):
for folks that don't understand what a ghost gun is,
this is an after market adaptation that you can go
out and purchase. Um, some people refer to them as
homemade guns, but they're available out there. They've been a
lable for years and years. And let me kind of
tell you how this works. If you think about a
(29:05):
semi automatic weapon such as in the Glock seventeen, it
has a slide on top of it, and you may
have seen this in movies where people will charge the
weapon by pulling the slide back and then it slams forward. Well,
when you pull that slide back, what you're doing is
in a very simplistic way, I'll just use this, because
(29:28):
the glock doesn't have a hammer, like an external hammer,
you're essentially cocking that weapon. Now, what happens is if
you buy a ghost gun, and in this case we're
talking about a barrel and a slide, you take the
manufactured barrel and slide off of the weapon. Okay, you
put it aside, and you take your ghost gun, which
(29:51):
fits the same frame, and you slide it on top.
And remember how I talked about earlier that these barrels
create unique signatures, Okay, unique signatures that are unique to
those particular barrels. Well, when you pump around through that thing,
you take the slide off of it, you take the
(30:12):
barrel off of it, which are the ghost gun, if
you will, and you put the factory the factory made
slide and barrel back on it. No one's gonna be
the wiser. You take the ghost gun parts. And I
don't know, I've been to Portland's. Portland's right by the
Pacific Ocean. You take that thing and you throw it
out there as far as you can, because at this point,
(30:34):
when the ballistic examination was done on both the seventeen
and the nineteen. They couldn't tie it back to either
one of those barrels. And this all comes down to
digital forensics because the police believe the police believe that
Nancy went on eBay, of all places, and purchased a
(30:56):
ghost gun. So this brings us back to that firing
pin that you were talking think about just a moment ago, Joe.
They were not able to match that strike. Yeah, they're not.
And this is what's and I can only imagine for
firearms examiner. Some people refer to them as a ballistics
ballistic scientists and firearms examination. Um. I can only imagine
(31:21):
their frustration because they've got two cases. Remember Dan was
shot twice. His injuries were essentially uh in in the chest, okay,
and in the back. And here's a little something that
people might not know that don't deal in a world
of anatomy the way I do. We have both um
(31:42):
an anterior chest and a posterior chest. Physicians, when they're
doing an examination and autopsy, they generally don't say back,
they'll say posterior chest because they all kind of communicate
with one another. So for for our purposes, here, we'll
say he was shot in the anterior and posterior chest
at two rounds that that entered his body. They actually
(32:04):
recovered they actually recovered the spint casings. And can you
imagine the frustration that when they get there, uh and
they recover these casings, the police are probably thinking, oh, wow,
we've recovered the casings. The perpetrator of the person that
perpetrated this crime didn't stay around long enough to collect them,
and then they ride off into the sunset. No, they
(32:24):
left him behind. That's a big piece of evidence, and
it's something that when you're um an investigator and you're
working on unsold thomaside, that's one box you can tick
automatically say, oh, my gosh, we've got recovered casings at
the scene. That means that if we can get our
hands on a suspected weapon, we can pair that up
because we're looking at extraction marks, which when that slide
(32:47):
goes back in the process of firing, there's these extractors
that pull that pull these rounds out or pull the
spint casing out and it ejects it and they leave
these little strations on the side of the case. In
and strations is just a fancy term for little linear
marks that are on there, but they are unique to
(33:08):
a particular weapon. Okay, that is extractors contained within that slide.
They also couldn't match up the firing pin in this case,
again contained within the slide. And when you look at
the base of that bullet right there on that primer
cap and you look at it microscopically, it's when you
for people that are not familiar with microscopes, and you
(33:29):
know when you do comparison microscopes in the ballistic lab.
You begin to look down, uh, the the ocular viewer
and you can see down the long axis and you're
looking at that dented primer cap and it has features
like the moon that are unique, that are unique to
that particular event. And can you imagine they're test firing
(33:52):
it with similar ammunition and they're not generating the same
thing every time, so their frustration is really high. So
at at the close all they could do is put
this together circumstantially. Now, the interesting thing about a glock
weapon is that, out of all the other weapons that
are out there, glocks are unique, um and particularly from
(34:15):
years back, depending upon what generation of glock you bought,
they're the first weapon. A lot of people don't know this.
They're the first weapon that is actually formed out of
a plastic mold, and they're made with polymers which makes
them very very light. Their characteristics are unique. So when
you're looking at general classification as a ballistic scientist and
(34:35):
you're examined the thing, you can generally categorize the extraction marks.
You can generally categorize the rifling marks that are left
behind on a projectile, and even the firing pin marks,
and say, Okay, I might not know which glock this
came from, but I do know it came from a
glock as opposed to Smith and Wesson or a Ruger
(34:55):
or h K or a six hour or whatever you're
looking at. Know that this came from a clock, but
they just couldn't match it up to a specific one.
How technically apt do you need to be to be
able to assemble these gun parts to make a working gun.
We know that Nancy Brophy bought ghost gun parts online
(35:20):
and then she also bought a slide and barrel to
fit the glock that she already had. So how much
knowledge do you need to be able to make this
a working gun? I'll sum this up by making this
one statement, do you have a computer and do you
have access to YouTube? That's how simple it is. And
with about a fifteen minute tutorial you can learn how
(35:43):
to break down their whole categories within YouTube that teach
you how to clean a glock weapon. Any number of
the platforms that are out there the glock has created,
you can go and put in that particular type of clock.
And part of cleaning weapon is you have to break
the weapon down. Okay, so within about fifteen minutes you
can change it in and out. And I'm I'm sure
(36:05):
that you know. When she's planning this thing, she's you know,
she's saying, eureka, you know, because she bought this, this
ghost gun, if you will, and she already has these
two other platforms, and she looks at this thing and
she says, okay, well, everything's writing on this. You know,
all her quote unquote research is writing on this. She's
watched YouTube video. She sat there, she disassembles the manufacturer
(36:29):
made weapon, grabs that those ghosts elements, plots it on there,
charges the weapon and she looks at it and she
can dry fire it, and she knows right then her
task is accomplished and all it takes now is for
and I don't know that she did this, but all
it would take now is for her to go to
a firing range or somewhere out in the wilderness and
pop off a few rounds to get comfortable with this thing,
(36:51):
just to make sure that it works, just so that
she has maybe a fail safe in place, because I
don't know if she may have shown up with a
backup weapon. Remember she had two clocks. But it's very
easy to do. It's not like she has to be
even a gunsmith in order to do this. I think
that anybody that has access to the Internet could make
this happen very very easily. And I gotta tell you
(37:14):
it's a unique approach on her part to alibi herself
by saying that this was part of research, because again
back to what I said earlier about being fearful who's
out in the audience. It terrifies me. The slide and
barrel that Nancy Brothy bought online were never recovered, so
(37:36):
that basically means that there's no way to make an
identical match of the weapon that killed Dan Brophy, Right,
you are about that and not I would think that
if her case were to come up on. If her
case were ever to come up on appeal, one of
the major points of appeal could potentially be could potentially
(37:59):
be the circumstantial nature of the ballistics with this, because
there was no way that they could put that weapon
into her hand, firing that weapon and generating those unique
markings on those projectiles that brought Dan's life to an end.
I think that for me, that's that could be a
(38:20):
major point of contention on the part of her defense
team if they choose to move forward, uh with you know,
with with an appeal in her particular case, I think
that that would make it unique. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is Body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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