Hello and welcome to dateline extra. Im craig mellin. This story involves a young mother who disappeared one morning. Her husband said she went for a run and never came home. It was a puzzling case. It happened in a safe suburban neighborhood, the kind of place where crime is unexpected. Even more unexpected, the tiny clue buried in a computer that unlocked a mystery. Heres keith morrison. Nothing about that morning made any sense. It all seemed like such a bad nightmare. This doesnt happen in our happy little world. It was a saturday morning in july 2008. The happy little world a sweet and leafy suburb of raleigh, North Carolina called cary. The sort of place a young family would aspire to. If you were someone like hannah pritchard, for example. Theres always lots of friend making going on through someone you meet. Lots of cookouts and family functions. Like the one in the neighborhood the night before. So hannah would have heard Party Stories that saturday morning. From her friend na
and then suddenly brad canceled nancy s credit cards, blocked her access to the bank accounts, put her on a cash allowance. i recall a time she was in the car with me and she called him and said i ve got $2 and we don t have any diapers. nancy couldn t get a job. she had no green card. she began painting a friend s house to earn some extra money. and when she did, brad reduced her allowance. she must have been just furious at him. furious would be an understatement. she s very proud and she d feel guilty. i m not going to take your money. no, this isn t your job to support me and my kids. nancy began locking important papers, including the girls passports, in her car. i went down in february of 08, and it was awful. i had never seen nancy stressed out before. i had never seen her raise her voice in the house, and she was just miserable. miserable, stressed. each day uncertain.
it began in march of 2011, 2 1/2 years after nancy s death. nancy rentz cooper never went for a run from her house. on july 12th of 2008. the prosecutors howard cummings, amy fitzhugh and bob zellinger had their own idea of what happened to nancy beginning the night before she disappeared. we think she came home from this party and she had said some things in front of him that might have upset him a little bit and that he choked her. killed her then, their theory goes. put her body in the trunk of his car, drove her to that drainage ditch, returned home to manufacture an alibi. why? they started with that shredded marriage. brad s affair. his cutting off nancy financially, stopping her move back to canada. she was, testified nancy s friends, increasingly desperate. she said, jennifer, he s breaking me. she said, i don t know how much i have left to fight. she told me when she slept at
was it was a missing persons. when detective george daniels arrived, nancy s neighborhood was already filling up with a small army of her panicked friends. nancy s family rushed to cary to join in the search. her husband brad made a public plea for help. if anyone knows anything, i just want them to contact the police with any information they may have and again, thank you to everyone that continues to come out and help out. sir, do you have a flyer? volunteers chased up and down the running trails where she loved to train. they combed the surrounding parks and lakes and woods for this woman they d grown to love since she and brad moved down from canada. when she walked into a room, that s where people wanted to be. she and brad were like a lot of people in cary. raising a family here, having got their start in another place and time. in brad and nancy s case, calgary, canada. that s where they met, back in 98. i really liked him. as did nancy s younger sister jill.
frantic about the situation and didn t have time to call them. but then a little more talking and the detective learned there may have been another reason altogether. nancy and brad were having marital problems. and he told me the last two months it seemed like they were getting better. and so when i asked him why they had problems, he told me he had had an affair. so daniels tucked that tidbit away and went on with the search for nancy. but after her body was found, things were different. the cooper house became a crime scene. police in and out turning the place upside down. and daniels kept his ears open because among nancy s friends and family, people were certainly talking. we re getting all this information and having to separate what s important versus what s just part of a marriage. brad, remember, told detective daniels that he and nancy were getting past the tension his affair had caused, but that wasn t quite the story he was hearing from nancy s family and friends.