Who killed Nancy Cooper?

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

North Carolinians have recently witnessed a number of high-profile murders, to include three women in the military, all of whom were pregnant. In the case of murdered Megan Touma, someone left a symbol scrawled in the victim’s motel room, a circle with a cross through it like one previously used by an unidentified California serial in the late 1960’s, a man known only as "Zodiac." A local newspaper subsequent received and published a letter in which the writer claimed responsibility for Touma’s murder. The letter contained the same chilling symbol and the anonymous writer claimed to be a serial killer who was patterning himself after “Zodiac.” 

Before the good people of North Carolina were even able to catch their breath, they were advised that another young mom was missing under mysterious circumstances. Nancy Cooper, the 34-year-old athletic mother of two young girls, was in the middle of a challenging marriage. She had allegedly asked her husband, Brad, to move out of their residence but he refused. 

Mr. and Mrs. Cooper are both from Canada, moving to the U.S. because of Brad’s job. Nancy was a runner who once had hopes of participating in the Olympics. A bad knee quashed that dream, but she continued to run in marathons and other races. No one other than Brad Cooper is known to have come forward to say they saw Nancy after she left a Friday night neighborhood party that she attended alone, although a friend spoke to her on the phone at 10:30 p.m. that same evening.

Brad says she arose before 7 a.m. Saturday morning and left for a run with a friend. "No," says her husband, "she didn’t take a cell phone or any form of identity with her." She also appears to have broken her tradition of taking her car to a coffee house to meet her running partner.  This experienced runner training for a half-marathon evidently broke her normal routing and appears not to have traveled along one of her normal running paths. 

In fact, police have yet to confirm that she actually left her home that morning at 7:00 a.m. as her husband stated. Where are the witnesses, independent of her husband, who saw her leave, or enter another car, or simply walk down the street that Saturday morning?  Her husband says that she was to meet a friend later that day, but it was Nancy’s regular running partner and not this other woman, or Nancy’s husband, who was worried enough after six to eight hours to report Nancy missing to the police.

Method of murder not made public
The usual search was mounted for the missing jogger.  Could she have ran away to avoid a challenging marriage? "Not without her children," her friends would say. Within days the body of Nancy Cooper would be found three miles from her home in an area some distance from her usual jogging route. Cause of death: murder. Method of death, withheld by police. Now unconfirmed reports are circulating that Brad may have purchased bleach as early as 4:00 a.m. the day Nancy was reported missing, and the victim’s father and twin sister have filed for custody of Nancy and Brad’s two daughters, ages 4 and 2, seeking to take them back to Canada with them. In their petition, they indicate that Brad had been involved in an extramarital affair and had yelled at and abused Nancy. They further suggest that Brad is emotionally unstable and that he poses a danger to the children. In court documents, Nancy Cooper's family indicates that Brad Cooper has attempted suicide on multiple occasions, as long ago as when he was a teenager and as recently as last winter.

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