Original subtitles

- Harlan, over here!

- Ladies and gentlemen, Harlan Coben.

[applause]

- He's the greatest thriller writer.

- Oh, come on.

- Coben's written over 30 "New York Times" bestsellers.

- With over a dozen hit TV shows and movies.

[dynamic music]

- Just when you think you have it all figured out,

think again.

[uneasy music]

I'm Harlan Coben.

The most unsettling mysteries begin with something simple,

a regular, normal day.

When Chef Daniel Brophy arrived at his culinary school,

there was no hint that his life was about to end suddenly

and violently.

No warning, no obvious threat,

no chance to prepare.

So who wanted Daniel dead?

And why kill him in the kitchen that meant so much to him?

We often look for the moment when everything changes.

But sometimes that moment is elusive,

hiding in plain sight,

buried inside an ordinary day.

And that's where our mystery begins.

[soft dramatic music]

- It didn't take much to make Dan happy.

He was a chef instructor,

a master gardener,

an oceanographer.

He looked at life as a survival game.

And he was good at that...

Right up until he was killed.

[sirens wailing]

- Students showing up for class

at the Oregon Culinary Institute

found a man shot to death in the school's kitchen.

[indistinct chatter]

- Many are grieving the loss

of Daniel Brophy.

- He was one of the most sought-after mushroom experts.

- There have been incidents where people have

confronted individuals

while foraging for mushrooms.

[camera shutter clicking]

- Dan was an instructor for a long time.

There was a staff,

hundreds of students,

an entire school.

- Both shots were directed towards his heart.

We thought this may be targeted.

- We knew immediately we needed to find the gun.

- We dug down really deep

into each of the people in Dan's life.

- We found this box.

And everybody's just like, oh, my God,

it's gotta be the murder weapon.

It's a ghost gun kit.

- An untraceable murder weapon.

- What we found was essentially kind of

a play-by-play for how to commit a murder

and get away with it.

[dramatic music]

- A crime happened here.

The past isn't what it seemed.

The story told turns out to be deception.

And just when you're sure you have the answer--

- 911, what is the address of your emergency?

Hello? Anyone there?

- there's one final twist.

[dramatic piano music]

- I grew up in Portland.

And the food was very, very traditional.

And then a handful of people started to wake the city up

to what food could be.

We started Oregon Culinary Institute

in the spring of 2006.

We tried to hire not necessarily great chefs,

but great instructors.

Those two skill sets don't often intersect.

But with Dan, they did.

[laughter]

- Dan Brophy had a way of engaging students

on a level that was truly unique.

- Chef Brophy was really knowledgeable.

- It's very salty.

It tastes like the ocean.

- A little gruff, a little rough around the edges.

- But his passion for what he did was contagious.

- Dan was married to Nancy Crampton-Brophy.

They had a little house with a big garden.

She had a big personality.

She's loud and laughing.

Nancy Brophy was a romantic suspense author.

She wrote a number of books.

She traveled to

national Romance Writers of America conferences.

And she was the president of the Rose City Romance Writers.

Dan and Nancy were together almost 25 years

and entering their golden years

in a way that fulfilled both of them.

- On the morning of June 2, 2018,

I arrived at the Oregon Culinary Institute

and immediately noticed that something was different.

[tense music]

The door was locked.

Chef Brophy would always unlock it before we got there.

After a few minutes,

our baking and pastry chef came and unlocked it.

[river whooshing]

- I was going fishing out in the Gorge.

Our baking chef called me,

asking me where a particular item is located.

I tell her as best I can.

- One of my classmates went into the kitchen

and immediately said,

there's somebody on the ground, call 911.

I saw Chef Brophy, and I dialed 911.

- 911.

[water rushing]

- Our baking chef called me back and she's hysterical.

"Dan's down. Dan's down.

I think he's had a heart attack."

The gal who found him started doing CPR.

And then she said, I must have cracked a rib

because there's suddenly blood.

- I remember the silence on the other side of the phone.

We all knew he was gone.

- The EMTs and paramedics arrived

and asked us to step outside so they could attend to him.

[sirens wailing]

I remember a cop walking past and saying,

"GSW," the words GSW.

And I was like, gunshot wound, what?

[ominous music]

- Once the fire department got there,

they cut off Dan's shirt.

They realized that he had a bullet wound to his chest.

Once they rolled Dan's body over,

they could see another bullet strike to his back.

- The fire department goes, this guy's been shot.

And they're wondering if there's a shooter still around.

[sirens wailing]

- Police came in and they cordoned off the school.

Wouldn't let anyone in.

- We were all panicked that there was

someone in the building

that was going to shoot someone else again.

By that point, there was a group

of students at the school.

A police officer said,

Okay, I need everyone in the student lounge,

and I need everyone's hands on the table.

We were all suspects.

[sirens wailing]

[tense music]

- Think about this for a moment.

They didn't even realize Dan had been shot at first.

That seems to defy belief, doesn't it?

That's reality for you.

I probably couldn't write that in a novel.

But as investigators gathered the students and staff,

every person who had walked through those kitchen doors

that morning became someone they couldn't ignore.

It had all the makings of a classic whodunit--

a familiar place, a room full of suspects,

and maybe a killer hiding among them.

- We had a number of students at the location--

28, 30 students.

We don't know who the shooter is.

It could be one of them.

So we had a lot of interviewing that needed to be conducted.

[sirens wailing]

- I was seeing people everywhere.

Media had arrived.

Cameras were there.

Right away we could tell, this is gonna be kind of a deal.

- Our initial search revealed that

there was no surveillance video at the school.

So really, we had to look at the physical evidence.

What we had was two shell casings,

appeared to be 9-millimeter.

Dan's phone was there, Dan's wallet, his glasses,

all personal items were still there.

- It looked like he had been preparing,

and someone came up and surprised him

when they killed him.

[ominous music]

- As I'm coming across the river,

we come down Jefferson Street in front of the school

and it's all taped off.

And so I pulled over.

There's a crowd all around the yellow tape.

And I turn, and there's Nancy.

And she's staring.

And I turn and I reach, and I hand the ribbon up,

and the officer looks at me and says, you can't do that.

And I lost it.

And I said, that's his [bleep] wife.

And you better let her in here.

And the officer looked at Nancy and says, are you Mrs. Brophy?

Yes, I am. Please, come with me.

- I was still interviewing students

when Dan's spouse arrived.

My understanding is she was at home

at the time Dan was murdered.

And so we knew we had to provide a death notification.

It's one of those tough things that

you have to do in police work.

You have to tell somebody, you know, terrible news.

- So...

- Yeah. Mm-hmm.

I wanted to find out about this gun

because my concern is that he decided

to start carrying that gun with him,

and it was taken from him

in the course of something, some kind of altercation.

- It was late in the afternoon.

And the coroner finally came.

And they brought Dan's body out.

[somber music]

I told the officer I needed to say goodbye.

And I crossed the line.

And I...

I lost it.

You know, I cried a lot over this one.

- Nothing hits harder for detectives

than facing family and friends after a loss.

That devastating moment they have to tell them

that their loved one is gone forever.

- Given that we didn't have much to go on,

we started to think that maybe this was targeted.

[tense music]

Does somebody have a problem with Dan?

- Dan could rub students the wrong way.

Not everyone appreciated his sense of humor.

- Dan had some encounters with students

that we had to have discussions about.

We told him that he could be himself,

but that he had to respect the students

and understand that not everyone got him.

- We interviewed all the students.

Did you ever have an issue with Dan?

You know, did you have a problem with Dan?

Did Dan give you a bad grade?

Were you angry at Dan for the way he talked to you in class?

- After interviewing all the current students,

none of them had an apparent issue with Dan.

So then we started thinking about the former students.

Maybe there was somebody in the past

Dan had made mad

and had come there to take him out.

- Every teacher collects a few grudges--

a harsh critique, a failed grade,

a reprimand delivered in front of the class.

It comes with the job.

Dan Brophy had spent years teaching students

who didn't always appreciate his methods.

And when you stand in front of a classroom long enough,

someone may take away the wrong lesson.

[suspenseful music]

- We had a whole ton of students,

but nobody that came forward to say,

I heard a gunshot, or I saw somebody running with a gun.

So the interview process was vast.

We realized that this was gonna be

a pretty big challenge to figure this case out.

Meanwhile, with Nancy telling us

that they bought a handgun that they had at home,

we knew we needed to look at the gun.

She told us it was a semiautomatic 9-millimeter.

We knew we had 9-millimeter casings at our scene.

- There was no firearm found at the scene.

So the detectives decided to drive Nancy home

to check to see if the firearm was there.

Turns out, the gun is back at home.

- It looked like it had never been touched.

Everything is in place.

The zip ties are through it.

And we were able to prove

through the Oregon State Police Crime Lab

that that was not the gun responsible.

While the detectives were at the house,

we started to fan out.

We canvassed his entire neighborhood.

And this neighbor that lived right across the street

from Chef Brophy was like,

well, one of his students used to live right next to us.

He's a really weird guy.

We heard that he hated Chef Brophy.

It took a lot of work to find this person's identity,

because he moved away.

But we eventually tracked him down.

He was a young man named Conrad,

the former culinary institute student.

He was now living in the Bend area.

It was difficult, because it was a farm

and it was a sort of a rural area.

And then I made the call.

[line ringing]

- Hey, I'm conducting an investigation right now,

and Chef Dan Brophy was killed.

- I think he felt a little bit paranoid.

There is this potential issue

that maybe he did have with Chef Brophy.

- We had the sheriff's office do background checks,

check on his criminal history.

Nothing going on.

And we couldn't connect him to anything at our scene,

anything in the area.

Once we went through all that,

we got to a point where there's just nothing here.

And he was very open with us.

It didn't seem like he was being deceptive in any way.

We believed that Conrad wasn't involved in any of this.

And after our other interviews,

we were not able to determine any beef with him

with any of the former students.

- Thank you all for coming.

It's great to see everybody here

to show their appreciation for one of my best friends

I've ever had in my entire life--

- They had a vigil for Dan--

graduates, current students, friends, family.

The crowd just kept coming.

- Dan was-- you know, he was the pinnacle.

He was at the top.

So it's a tough loss for everyone.

- Nancy told stories and thanked everybody.

- He was a huge part of our school,

part of the heart and soul of our school.

And so there was grief.

Immediately after,

I do remember Nancy coming to us

and she very strongly chastised Brian and I

for not having security cameras in the school.

- In fiction, when my detective hits the wall,

I can always put a clue on the next page.

Real detectives don't get that luxury.

They have to work through every name and chase every lead,

all while a grieving family waits for answers.

But somewhere in that long list of names and dead ends,

one overlooked detail begins to stand out.

[ominous music]

- We were trying to look for any clue as to what happened.

There was no surveillance video.

And so the detective said, hey, do you want to walk around

and look for surveillance footage?

Bellagio's Pizza, which is almost directly

across the street from the culinary institute,

they had a camera and allowed us

to view their surveillance from that morning.

- We knew this area had houseless issues.

There were some homeless people

that were regulars in the area.

That morning, Chef Brophy had left the garage door open.

Could one homeless person have seen that

as a window of opportunity to go in and steal liquor,

rob the person in there,

and then Dan was killed?

[suspenseful music]

- Watching the surveillance footage,

we did see a known homeless person circling

the culinary institute around the time of the murder.

- We found out his name was Oscar Taylor

from some of the officers that work in that particular area.

- We knew we needed to do some follow-up,

so we had a flyer out for patrol to try to locate him.

- He had a violent past, had assaulted people,

had also fought with the police.

We searched the entire area,

but we could not find Oscar.

[sirens wailing]

[brooding music]

- In books, the guilty always run.

It's practically a rule in crime fiction.

The moment the net starts to close, our suspect bolts.

And before you know it,

the chase is half the story.

- With Oscar Taylor, we were thinking that maybe

he went in to just find some money or property,

'cause he was homeless, and got confronted by Dan.

And then there was an altercation and he shot him.

- We didn't really know where he was.

- We went back for days and days,

collecting as much video as we could.

- Then, I'd caught another homicide case.

Darren and I were working it together.

And we were all the way on the other side of town.

And this area had a high transient population

where people were camping.

And we were canvassing in that area,

and a guy drove by on a bike.

And lo and behold, it's Oscar.

And so we stopped him and we interviewed him.

- Let's be honest.

If I wrote a novel where detectives searched for a man,

only to find him by coincidence

while driving across town on an unrelated case,

you'd throw the book at me.

It would feel too convenient, too unrealistic.

But real life doesn't care what makes sense in fiction.

[camera shutter clicks]

- He admitted that he was out by the institute

when Dan was killed.

- We went through a lot of Q&A with him about,

hey, have you been involved in anything lately?

When we saw him on the Bellagio's video surveillance,

he was wheeling that, going from left to right.

At some point, did he maybe then go over to OCI?

- And he said, no, I remember that day.

He's like, I don't remember

seeing anything and hearing anything.

- And then we found other videos

that showed he had continued going up the hill

and out of the crime scene area.

So we were able to rule him out completely.

[ominous music]

- Learning who the person is that's been killed

is very important.

Coming to understand who Dan is

becomes a key piece in your investigation.

- We learned that Dan was really into mushroom foraging

out in the coastal forest ranges.

- He would take people like me to teach me

to look for morels or chanterelles

or lobster mushrooms.

- The mushroom that we're hoping to find

are chanterelles.

- Dan had spent years doing that.

And he could make a lot of money selling mushrooms.

Mushroom foragers are also

notoriously private with their locations.

- Once people find a spot that they like,

they don't tell anybody and they tend to protect it.

There have been incidents where people have

confronted individuals while foraging for mushrooms.

A lot of people in that community

do actually carry firearms when they go out

in case there is a confrontation.

- There's been, you know, fights

and even gunplay over mushrooms.

- We interviewed the family of Dan Brophy.

There was Dan's son, Nathaniel,

from another marriage.

Nathaniel was into guns, had guns,

and he thought that it would be odd

that his dad would purchase a gun without even mentioning it.

[patrons chattering]

- Did your father ever talk about

using guns or wanting to buy a gun at all?

- No, not to my knowledge.

- Okay.

[suspenseful music]

- And so we thought maybe Dan

did want to buy this gun with Nancy for his own protection,

whether it be at the school or whether it be

when he goes out mushroom foraging.

We wanted to see if there was somebody involved

in that community that maybe had a beef with Dan.

We didn't know if somebody took it too far

or somebody was protecting their territory,

and that Dan had somehow stepped on somebody's toes.

- Mushroom foraging, given how competitive it is,

became so important to follow-up on.

We tracked down fellow mushroom foragers.

And there was really nothing to indicate that

Dan had some sort of altercation.

[somber music]

- So at this point, we're ruling out a lot of the things

that we thought could have been possible in this case.

We felt like we'd covered everything.

Right now, there's not many answers.

- Investigators chase every lead--

Dan's students, his work,

his passion for mushrooms.

But one by one, they come up empty.

Weeks pass, then months.

The case goes quiet and people begin to assume

it's dead and buried.

But answers don't disappear. They wait.

And when they finally surface,

they return with a fury no one saw coming.

[dramatic music]

- We went back for days and days,

collecting as much video as we could from different areas.

And this became kind of a video case.

We went back and reviewed a lot of the surveillance.

And that's when we started seeing a van on the video.

The first time that the van came to the area

on Bellagio's video was about 7:01 AM.

So that van's there pretty early,

way before Chef Brophy is.

Then we don't see that van again on that video

until it comes back, leaving the area at 7:28.

Dan Brophy had to deactivate the alarm at OCI.

The alarm was deactivated at 7:21 AM

for students arriving at 7:30.

So we know that van had been in that vicinity

right during the time frame that he would have been killed.

[tense music]

We were frustrated

because the license plate was pixelated,

so you couldn't really make out what it was.

But I remember watching it over and over and over--

pause, play, pause, play-- and magnifying it.

We were able to get a few of the numbers.

And so we assigned some other detectives

to work on finding all the Oregon Toyota Sienna minivans

with that partial plate.

- I'm at the office.

Nancy calls me 'cause she had some questions.

This is not out of the ordinary

for a victim's loved one to call

to find out what's happening or what's going on.

- This may give you a laugh.

I don't want to be the stupid question of the day,

but I think I need to be the stupid question of the day.

Uh... - [chuckles] Okay.

- Why? [detective scoffs]

Because I thought...

You know? - [detective chuckles] Okay.

- Yeah.

I'm kind of taken aback.

Typically, how that works is you file your claim

and the insurance company calls us,

not the loved one of the victim,

and not days after the homicide.

Well, what's going on here?

[ominous music]

- We started to look into the state of their finances.

- Some of the associates said that they had

had some difficulty making ends meet.

- When Nancy started getting into writing,

I started noticing some of the financial challenges

they were going through.

At one point, they had bought a Prius.

And then there was no Prius.

I asked Dan, so where'd the Prius go?

Oh, we couldn't afford it. He was very matter of fact.

Couldn't afford it anymore.

- Nancy really wanted to project an image of success

as a writer.

And unfortunately for Nancy, success never came.

So we're talking about more than a decade of writing books,

trying to get published,

pushing them out in self-publishing,

trying to get an audience, and not having that add up.

- We found out that sometimes they were not able

to pay their mortgage.

- They really overextended themselves.

Between the two of them, they spent all the money they had.

And so in order to make ends meet,

Nancy took on the job

of selling life insurance on the side.

Then she started taking out policies on Dan.

- So she had purchased various life insurance policies,

paying several thousand dollars a month

in life insurance premiums.

At the time that Dan died,

they had about $850,000 in life insurance.

And there was about another $400,000 available

to Nancy from workers' comp.

- Meanwhile, she was fixing the house up.

It looked like she was getting ready to sell the house.

Then Dan's parents told us that the money situation

was so bad at one point that they actually

gave her the van that she currently owned,

the Toyota Sienna minivan.

- Looking at surveillance footage,

we identified about 22 other minivans of that year

that were registered in Oregon.

And then we tried to match up the plate.

And we were able to eliminate every single one...

except Nancy's.

- It became very clear that Nancy was involved.

So we started to develop this theory.

[soft dramatic music]

- Nancy was enthralled with being a writer,

where she would write her novels

and travel to exotic places.

- That was her dream.

But she realized that with Dan alive,

that would never be able to happen.

- We had a motive that

you could directly see immediately--

the life insurance policy.

[suspenseful music]

- We decided we're gonna write a search warrant

for Nancy Brophy's house.

We knew we needed to find the murder weapon.

Nancy was home during the search,

and she acted really weird.

She's in the front yard.

And she started wandering around

in little circles saying,

you think I killed my husband.

And you think-- I didn't do anything.

I wasn't there.

And she sort of had this, like, little meltdown.

And then during the search of the house,

that's when we found out that she had a storage unit.

- And that's when we found a box that was marked

"Purses, Scarves, and GK."

And so they open up the box and they find purses,

scarves, and a ghost gun kit.

And we thought, there it is. That's the murder weapon.

- A ghost gun is a kit that is 80% built.

They're called ghost guns

because they weren't tracked anywhere.

So you could buy one of these guns,

use it in a crime and get rid of it,

and nobody would even know that you ever had it.

- And so I open it up. And I'm looking at it.

I'm like going,

something's not right here.

That gun is all in its pieces.

It's highly unfunctional at this point.

- So we had the ghost gun tested

against the shell casings that we had from the crime scene.

And they didn't match.

Nancy did not use the ghost gun.

- But it made Nancy more suspicious to us.

I knew there had to be something else going on.

She wrote novels where she talks about

how to cover your tracks.

She knew police procedures.

- Nancy is not just an author.

She's a romantic suspense author.

She writes stories about women who kill their husbands

and get away with it.

- That's when I started looking at the gun

that she's given us right after Dan was killed.

She would know that if we tested that gun,

it would not match the casings.

She had to have done something with this firearm.

- For a Glock handgun, there's a very unique mark

that's left on the spent casings

by the slide and barrel assembly.

The slide and barrel is a unique part of the handgun

that you can then compare to spent casings

to identify the gun.

- Some firearms experts told us that,

well, you could just pay a few hundred bucks

and get a new slide and barrel.

And you could put that onto another gun.

And if you did that, the markings that it leaves

on the shell casing, they wouldn't match.

- So I thought, okay,

what does she have on her computers?

- When we were digging through Nancy's computer,

we found that she did buy a slide and barrel.

And that slide and barrel would fit the gun she turned over

on the day of the homicide.

The theory became Nancy bought the ghost gun,

couldn't put it together,

bought the gun that she turned over.

She took the slide and barrel from eBay,

swapped them out, committed the murder,

put the old one back on.

We did search her house for the slide and barrel from eBay,

but we never found it.

She probably just threw it

in one of our many bodies of water

that we have around here.

- Nancy was arrested about three months after the murder.

- We asked her about the evidence,

but she didn't talk to us at that point

'cause we had arrested her.

- And then it was shortly after she was arrested

that we got that article.

That's when things kind of got juicy.

[dramatic music]

- A 71-year-old romantic suspense writer,

Nancy Crampton-Brophy, has written nearly a dozen books.

But it's an essay she penned back in 2011

that is now getting the most attention.

- "How to Murder Your Husband" is a satirical blog post

about what a woman should do if she would like

to become single without having to go through a messy divorce.

"How to Murder Your Husband, by Nancy Brophy.

"As a romantic suspense writer,

I spend a lot of time thinking about murder."

Nancy Brophy actually analyzes each option

as if she were the one doing it.

- You know, everyone kind of went,

oh, my gosh, she wrote about this.

And then she did it.

- The novelist who wrote about how to murder your husband

is charged with murdering her husband.

- Every news outlet seemingly wanted to cover it.

[presenters speaking in various languages]

- Nancy wrote a satirical piece

about how to murder your husband.

Are you kidding me?

I've read a lot of thrillers,

and let's just say this is either

the most bizarre coincidence,

or something far more unsettling.

- It looked damning.

The problem was it wasn't direct evidence.

[intriguing music]

- Going into the trial, you know there's always a risk

when it's just circumstantial evidence

in the entire case--

Nancy Brophy's van in this area during that time frame,

the theory about the gun.

We had no eyewitnesses, no murder weapon.

- We knew the jury was gonna walk in

and see their grandmother wearing a cardigan

and think, how in the world could she have done this?

- The defense calls Nancy Crampton-Brophy.

- And, you know, am I brokenhearted?

I'm brokenhearted.

Am I delighted to hear stories from people

who loved him as much as I did?

Yeah, I am.

- She always thought she was

the smartest person in the room.

- Talking about Dan, period, makes me emotional.

- And because of that,

she knew that this was her performance of a lifetime.

- What's it like to be without him now?

- It's like you've lost an arm, you know?

Like, you're just not as good as you were

when you were with him--

when you were with him.

- Nancy was convincing,

talking about her love for Dan.

But we know that her original alibi

that she was at home writing was a lie

because we have video of her car driving around the area

at the time of Dan's death.

I needed the jurors to understand

by the end of her testimony that she's a liar

and she definitely did this.

Everybody loved Dan.

Nobody would want to hurt Dan.

Even Nancy herself told that to detectives.

Nobody would want to hurt Dan.

So nobody else had motive.

But Nancy did.

She's manipulating every single person in this room.

- Shawn Overstreet is so amazing at

getting Nancy to start talking

and then talking and then talking.

- The reason why I have no memory

is because I was stunned by the fact Dan was dead.

And I wouldn't have been stunned

if I'd been in the building and shot him.

- I didn't suggest that you did go in to shoot him.

What I'm suggesting in asking-- - Okay.

- Is, did you just go in the building?

- And then he lets her

basically create enough rope to hang herself.

- You would agree that you're driving around

in front of the culinary institute

at the exact time that Dan is being murdered?

[suspenseful music]

- I-- no.

Actually, I don't agree with that.

I was driving around for a full hour before Dan got murdered.

- I'm sorry, did you just say that you were driving around?

- Yes, that's what I was doing,

was driving around, riding.

- I thought you didn't know that you were driving.

- Didn't I say that yesterday?

- No. No. - Okay.

- So let's go back over.

- Okay, let's go back.

- She thought that she could outwit the jury

and convince them of something that's not true.

- It's my understanding that the jury has reached a verdict.

Count 1, murder in the second degree,

guilty.

- After the verdict came back,

I immediately went to the family.

I gave Karen, Dan's mom, a big hug.

- Do you feel like justice has been served for your son?

- Absolutely. Absolutely.

- The whole family seemed very relieved

that Nancy was held responsible.

- It was surprising to me the level that she went to

for financial freedom.

The planning that Nancy Brophy put into killing her husband--

it was diabolical, in my opinion.

- Be a good opportunity to remember the man that he was,

the father that he was,

you know, the grandfather that he was.

- And the husband he was.

[soft dramatic music]

- The persona of Dan Brophy was, if you have a question,

don't expect a happy answer.

It's gonna be, you ask me the question, here's the truth.

I'm gonna give you the truth all the time.

- What I most want people to understand about Dan Brophy is

that beyond the, at times, hard exterior,

there was a really big heart

that cared very much about the students he taught.

- Dan Brophy would want you all to get on with your lives,

and would want you to go out and celebrate

a meal with your family, and remember,

that's the time you have with them.

And he'd really want you to go try some Korean fried chicken

up in Vancouver.

[somber music]

- A novelist who pens an essay titled

"How to Murder Your Husband"

ends up accused of doing just that.

With the final twist that blurs the line

between page and reality, the words Nancy Brophy wrote

become evidence used against her,

and maybe, I don't know, a confession of sorts.

I'll admit, as a fiction writer,

that troubles me on several levels.

I'm Harlan Coben. Good night.

[dramatic music]

[dramatic music]