[chris]

Nancy Cooper, a 34-year-old mother of two, was reported missing from her home in Cary, North Carolina, on the morning of July 12, 2008, after she failed to show up at a friend's house to help paint a room.

The friend, Jessica Adam, contacted Cary police that afternoon and told a dispatcher she had not been able to reach Cooper and was worried because the couple was going through a divorce. According to a recording of the call, Adam said Cooper had supposedly left for a morning run and had not been heard from since. "Because of the situation with the divorce, I was just wondering if you can help," she said, adding at one point that she wondered whether "her husband has done something, God forbid." Her husband, Brad Cooper, had told Adam that his wife left to run with another friend.

Two days later, a man walking his dog found Cooper's body in a drainage ditch at the end of a cul-de-sac in an unfinished subdivision less than three miles from the couple's home. She had been strangled and was wearing only a sports bra. Nancy Cooper had grown up in Edmonton, Alberta, before moving to North Carolina.

Police arrested Brad Cooper in October 2008 and charged him with first-degree murder. At his 2011 trial, which ran 36 days, prosecutors pointed to a file recovered from his work laptop showing a Google Maps search that had zoomed in on the spot where his wife's body was later found, dated the day before she disappeared. A jury convicted him in May 2011, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in September 2013, ruling that the trial judge had wrongly prevented defense experts from testifying that the computer files could have been altered. The court ordered a new trial.

Rather than face a retrial, Brad Cooper pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in September 2014 and acknowledged killing his wife after years of asserting his innocence. He was sentenced to 12 to 15 years, with credit for time already served, and agreed to let Nancy's twin sister adopt the couple's two daughters, who were raised in Canada.

Cooper finished his sentence and was released from a North Carolina prison in November 2020, when federal immigration authorities took him into custody for deportation to Canada.