True Crime

When Nancy Cooper Went Missing in Cary, N.C.

October is the designated month for bringing awareness to Domestic Violence, but it is a topic I believe we should be talking about year round, as it still remains a prevalent issue in our society. I’ve discussed several cases tied to domestic violence in this podcast, including Patty Jo Pulley from Episode 45, Across State Lines, Maryann and Elaine Boczkowski in Episode 48, Two Wives, Two Deaths, and Shelby Wilkie from Episode 85. Many other missing persons cases likely have ties to domestic violence but just don’t have the solid evidence yet to back that up.

On July 12, 2008, 34-year-old Nancy Cooper from Cary, N.C., went missing while out on a run. At least, that’s what her husband told people. It turns out Nancy, like so many other women, was a victim of domestic violence.

Nancy had moved to North Carolina from Canada in 2001 so her husband Brad could take a tech job with Cisco. The two had attended a neighborhood barbeque the night before she went missing, which Brad left early in order to take their two young girls home. According to Brad, Nancy stayed a little later and returned home a little after midnight. The next morning, Brad was seen on a surveillance camera at a nearby Harris Teeter grocery store buying milk at 6:20 a.m. He told investigators he went home, but then returned to the store 10 minutes later because he realized he forgot laundry detergent. While there, he claimed Nancy called him from home and asked him to also pick up juice. Nancy then left the home around 7 a.m. to go jogging.

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Around 2 p.m., one of her friends made a disturbing 911 call. She told the dispatcher that she and Nancy had made plans to get together at 8 a.m., and because of the situation with the divorce, she was concerned she hadn’t been able to get a hold of her friend. Apparently, Nancy had begun divorce proceedings against Brad, hoping to take her two daughters back home to Canada with her. The two were still living in the same house. The morning she disappeared, Nancy’s friend found it odd that her car was still at the home she shared with Brad, and her cell phone was there, too. From what I could find in my research, it doesn’t like Brad made any calls reporting concerns about his wife. The next day, hundreds of volunteers searched the Lochmere Lake and Regency Park, where they thought Nancy had supposedly gone running.

Two days later, a man walking his dog spotted the body of a woman in drainage ditch and called 911. The undeveloped subdivision was about three miles from Nancy and Brad Cooper’s home. The body was eventually identified as Nancy Cooper. Nancy had been strangled, choked so hard a bone in her neck broke. She wore only a tangled sports bra and one diamond earring. There were no signs of sexual assault.

Nancy’s parents, who had traveled to Cary from Canada with Nancy’s sister, petitioned the court system for emergency custody of Nancy and Brad’s two daughters, who were four and a half and two years old at the time. They shared the details of Nancy and Brad’s tense marital situation. Brad had agreed to the arrangement at first but then took their passports to prevent them from going. Other details emerged that investigators paid close attention to. Although Nancy had been a successful career woman who worked for IBM prior to moving to Cary, Brad had made it difficult for Nancy to apply for a work Visa, leaving her dependent on odd jobs like painting friends houses in order to earn money. In details that sound very much like the controlling relationship between Josh and Susan Powell, Brad put Nancy on a strict budget that limited her access to their bank accounts.

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By early 2008, she had confessed to her parents that she could no longer live with Brad and sought counsel. Nancy’s parents were granted temporary custody of the children while investigators zeroed in on Brad as their prime suspect. They surmised that Nancy had never gone jogging—that she had probably been murdered sometime after returning from the barbeque, and Brad dressed her in a sports bra and shorts before leaving her body in the nearby subdivision. A search of Brad’s computer showed a Google Earth search of the exact spot where Nancy’s body had been found.

Brad Cooper was arrested in October of 2008 and charged with first-degree murder. His trial began in March of 2011.After more than 10 hours of deliberation over three days, a jury of 10 women and two men find Brad Cooper guilty of first-degree murder. He is sentenced to life in prison. However, his attorneys argued that Brad had not received a fair trial, and that investigators quickly honed in on him as a suspect because they didn’t want the residents of Cary to fear a crazed killer was stalking the streets. In September of 2013, The North Carolina Court of Appeals ordered a new trial for Brad Cooper, because they felt key testimony from several witnesses had been withheld from jurors at the original trial.

In September 2014, Brad Cooper pled guilty to the second-degree murder of Nancy in order to avoid a retrial of the case. As part of the plea arrangement, he relinquished parental rights of the couple’s two daughters. Nancy’s twin sister Krista formally adopted the girls.

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Brad was sentenced to at least 12 years in prison and got credit for the 2,156 days, or a little more than five years, that he had already served. In the fall of 2020, he was released from the Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine and will be deported back to Canada. His two daughters he had with Nancy are now young adults, and he is not allowed to have contact with them.

Alice Stubbs, the attorney who had represented Nancy in her divorce proceedings, made a statement that the Cooper case had taught her a lot about spotting subtle signs of domestic violence.

“They looked like the perfect happy couple, but he was controlling and manipulative, and the more I talked with Nancy, the more I learned about that,” she said. “Hindsight is 20-20 for all of us, but domestic violence takes on many forms.”

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