Nancy Guthrie has been missing for almost three months, and investigators have yet to name a suspect, but a former FBI assistant director believes the answer lies close to home.
On a recent episode of Michael Hershman’s new podcast, The Fairfax Files, he spoke with John Miller, a former FBI assistant director, who said the person responsible for the alleged abduction is most likely local and had knowledge of the area and Nancy’s living conditions.
Nancy, the 84-year-old mother of Today‘s Savannah Guthrie, has been missing since the early hours of February 1, when police believe she was abducted from her home in Tucson, Arizona. While investigators have released doorbell camera footage of a masked suspect and a description of that individual, no suspects have been named.
“I think the answer is—and I think that the Guthrie family believes this, too—the answer is right there. The answer is in Tucson,” Miller said, per Parade. “This was probably something hatched locally by someone who thought, ‘Here’s an individual who is relatively defenseless, lives alone, is vulnerable, unable to put up a lot of resistance. If we came and took her away, who is connected to… someone with resources and money.”
Miller noted that in the majority of kidnapping cases, the suspect is often a person with some sort of connection to the victim, whether that be a former employee, a partner of an employee, a family member, or someone who worked on or near the property and had access.
“I don’t think that this case is going to be vastly different,” Miller stated. He said he believed it was probably “someone local who had enough contact around that house to assess what that would be like, and had some idea, some nightmarish dream about, ‘We’re gonna demand a lot of money, and we’re gonna do it through crypto.'”
He was referring to a ransom note sent to TMZ and other outlets in the early days of Nancy’s disappearance. The note demanded millions in Bitcoin, including a link to a verified Bitcoin wallet address.
Miller said the suspect(s) likely thought, “‘We’re never gonna have to go to a ransom drop or pick up a package or show ourselves, we’re gonna take kidnapping into the digital age, and we’re gonna get a big payday.'”
As for why that ransom was never paid, Miller said he thinks ultimately that “this is a kidnapping gone wrong.”
“You have a ransom demand that is crystal clear and says, ‘Just pay the money, you’ll never hear from us again.’ And then you have a second note that we know a little bit about, but not all of the details, that basically ends the negotiations,” he explained, referring to a second note sent to the Guthrie family in which the suspect allegedly apologized, suggesting that Nancy had died.
Other ransom notes have been sent to outlets since, with some claiming to know Nancy’s whereabouts. Miller doesn’t buy the legitimacy of those correspondences.
“You have opportunists who came behind that, who couldn’t prove anything, about having any particular knowledge that gave them credibility,” he said. “These were people just saying, ‘Send me money, and I’ll tell you who did it or where she is.’ Those are almost 100% frauds.”
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Originally published on tvinsider.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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