"In 'The Wrong Cop,' she wrote about a woman who 'spent every day of her marriage fantasizing about killing' her husband."

"In 'The Wrong Husband,' a woman tried to flee an abusive husband by faking her death.'And in '“How to Murder Your Husband' — an essay — [Nancy] Crampton Brophy... describ[ed] five core motives and a number of murder weapons from which she would choose if her character were to kill a husband in a romance novel. She advised against hiring a hit-man to do the dirty work — 'an amazing number of hit men rat you out to the police' — and against hiring a lover. 'Never a good idea.' Poison, not advised either. 'Who wants to hang out with a sick husband?'... '[I]f the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail.'"

From "Novelist who wrote about ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ charged with murdering her husband" (WaPo). The husband, Daniel Brophy, "was fatally shot at his workplace at the Oregon Culinary Institute," where he was "a beloved chef."

We're told "Police had no description of the suspect." So why was Crampton Brody suspected, other than because one always suspects the spouse and because of her fiction-writing? She's supposed to have shown up in his workplace with a gun and shot him? Is the idea that it was her because she's known to deviously work out murder plots, and shooting the husband in his workplace — where people would notice and recognize her — could be what a devious murderer might do to avoid suspicion (as long as you don't get recognized by anyone)?

The judge sealed the probable cause affidavit, and police wouldn't discuss the case with WaPo.

Crampton Brophy was married to her husband for 27 years, and she wrote about it on her blog:

“My husband and I are both on our second (and final — trust me!) marriage. We vowed, prior to saying ‘I do,’ that we would not end in divorce. We did not, I should note, rule out a tragic drive-by shooting or a suspicious accident.” At the end of the post, she said she loved “the way he can make me laugh when I’m really angry,” and “how, when I least expect it, he can say the perfect thing.”

“But one last word of caution,” she wrote, “if I ever take a swan-dive off a high building, investigate. Investigate. Investigate.”

Comments at WaPo take the cue from the headline to make light of the death and the suspicion of the wife. "Best headline since Headless Body Found in Topless Bar," says the most-liked comment.

Somebody else uses the story as one more opportunity to hate-fantasize about Trump: "It always hits the wrong one! With that paranoid look and marital intentions, Nancy Crampton Brophy would no doubt have made the ideal 3rd. [sic] wife of the Lunatic-in-Chief."

While I'm disapproving of comments, let me show favor for: "Did she have writers glock?"

ADDED: Can you write books in prison? Oh, yes! Some of the greatest writing (and some of the most infamous writing) in the history of the world has been done in prison:

... Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (524 AD)... Marco Polo... Miguel de Cervantes... Sir Walter Raleigh compiled his History of the World, Volume 1 in a prison chamber in the Tower of London, but he was only able to complete Volume 1 before he was executed. Hugo Grotius wrote his commentary on St. Matthew while in prison (1618-21), from which he escaped while hidden in a chest of books... John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) while in jail. Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German while held at Wartburg Castle. Marquis de Sade wrote prolifically during an 11-year period in the Bastille, churning out 11 novels, 16 novellas, two volumes of essays, a diary and 20 plays.

Napoleon Bonaparte dictated his memoir while imprisoned on St. Helena island; it would become one of the best sellers of the 19th century. Fyodor Dostoevsky spent four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his membership in a liberal intellectual group from which he produced the autobiographical novel The House of the Dead; it was one of the first books to inform Russians about life inside an exile labor camp. Oscar Wilde wrote the philosophical essay "De Profundis" while in Reading Gaol...

E. E. Cummings 1922 autobiographical novel The Enormous Room was written while imprisoned by the French during World War I on the charges of expressing anti-war sentiments in private letters home. Adolf Hitler wrote his autobiographical and political ideology book Mein Kampf while he was imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote much of his work while imprisoned by the fascist government of Mussolini during the 1930s; this was later published as Prison Notebooks, and contained his influential theory of cultural hegemony. In 1942 Jean Genet wrote his first novel Our Lady of the Flowers while in prison near Paris, scrawled on scraps of paper. O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) wrote 14 stories while in prison for embezzlement, and it was during this time that his pseudonym "O. Henry" began to stick.... Albert Speer wrote his two memoirs Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries while incarcerated at Spandau prison....

Prison inspires writing. It enables writing.

But can you blog in prison? Yes, but not really. What I'm seeing is that you'd have to use the method of mailing your writing to someone on the outside, and that person would transfer the material onto a blog they've set up for you. That is, you need an intermediary, and, without the immediacy and the ability to cut and paste and to link and interact with people in real time, I don't think what you are doing is really blogging. That is to say, if I became a prisoner, this blog would either end or turn into something that doesn't fit my definition of a blog. And if I'm ever arrested, the previous sentence could be used as evidence for or against me, and so would this one.