Murder She Wrote
According to Nancy’s Amazon author profile, her first published work was a pamphlet for the University of Houston titled "Between Your Navel And Your Knees" about the changing mores of sexuality in the 1960s and '70s. She also wrote for trade journals and human resources departments, "but her true love was story-telling."
In 2003, she joined the local chapter of Romance Writers of America and started publishing novellas and romantic suspense novels whose titles included The Wrong Lover, The Wrong Hero and The Wrong Husband.
"Her stories are about pretty men and strong women, about families that don't always work and about the joy of finding love and the difficulty of making it stay," her profile states.
Seven years before her arrest, Nancy wrote an essay titled "How to Murder Your Husband" for the website See Jane Publish, according to KOIN 6 News. (Other media described it as a blog post.)
The judge excluded the essay from trial, "but the prosecutor quoted its themes without mentioning it by name," The Oregonian reported.
In her post, Nancy listed five motives for murder: financial; lying and cheating; falling in love with someone else; being abused; and being a professional (i.e. a hired killer).
She also listed several methods for killing a person, including using knives, garrote (or strangling), poison, heavy equipment and hiring a lover or a hitman. As for guns, she wrote: "Loud, messy, requires some skill. If it takes 10 seconds for the sucker to die, either you have terrible aim or he's on drugs."
An autopsy showed Daniel was shot once in the back and then in the chest, at close range, while he was lying on the floor of a kitchen at the Oregon Culinary Institute. His students discovered his body; he'd been filling buckets of water and ice after arriving and unlocking the building in the morning, The New York Times reported.
A forensic scientist with the Oregon State Police testified that Daniel was likely shot with a Glock pistol, the same brand of gun parts that Nancy had purchased, Portland's KPTV Fox 12 reported.
The prosecution said that in late 2017, Nancy started researching "ghost guns," untraceable firearms that can be bought online and assembled at home. She spent $15,000 in guns and gun parts, including a ghost gun delivered in January 2018 that she didn't have the skills to build, the prosecution said.
Investigators also found that Nancy bought a Glock handgun barrel on eBay in February 2018. They theorized she attached that barrel—which was never recovered—to another Glock pistol she bought at a gun show, The Oregonian reported.
Video cameras captured footage of Nancy's minivan near the Oregon Culinary Institute at the time her husband was killed. She claimed she had "no memory" of the trip. She and a psychologist called by the defense said she suffered retrograde amnesia from the trauma of finding out her husband had been murdered.
At trial, Nancy's stepson Nathaniel Stillwater described his father as an affectionate grandfather with a dry sense of humor. He also testified that his father and stepmother seemed to have a good marriage, and never spoke with him about their relationship or finances.
Stillwater said that, after his father's murder, he took a week off to grieve and help Nancy, KPTV Fox 12 reported.
"I knew there was a lot to be done but [I was] also concerned for her well-being," he said. "At that point in time, we didn't know what had happened."
Stillwater sued Nancy in 2019 for the wrongful death of his dad, but her attorney requested the lawsuit be put on hold at the time of her 2022 trial.
At the conclusion of the seven-week trial in May 2022, Nancy was found guilty. She was sentenced to life in prison and is serving her sentence at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Ore.
