Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. I'm Ann Emerson, and this is Criminally Obsessed. Despite a report that said the Nancy Guthrie ransom notes were fake, the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's office says they're still investigating several letters.
- [00:13]
B
One of the big things that's missing, It's a communication channel.
- [00:17]
A
Whether the notes were real or not, the messages were incredibly painful for Nancy's family.
- [00:23]
C
Every hour and minute and second and every long night has been agony since then.
- [00:31]
A
They claim the kidnapping had Nancy. They wanted money, and one even said she was gone.
- [00:38]
C
We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace.
- [00:51]
A
The FBI has to consider every potential piece of evidence, right? And now it's been five months since Nancy disappeared, so I had to get answers from Morgan Wright about ransom notes.
- [01:04]
B
It's parasitic communications. They thrive off of the host. The host is the event, the family.
- [01:09]
A
Y' all loved his insight before on the Guthrie case, so we brought him back.
- [01:14]
B
There was nothing, nothing in there that told me this is a valid communication.
- [01:18]
A
Tell me you know, what's the first red flag for the investigators? Like and subscribe so you don't miss any of your favorite experts on the cases that you're obsessed with. Now let's get into it. Thank you so much for joining me. Morgan Wright, CEO and founder of the national center for Open and Unsolved Cases. You've also taught agents at the behavioral analysis unit at the FBI. Thrilled to have you with me today, because, you know, it's something that you've been talking about for a while now, telling us sort of what you thought of these ransom notes. So take me through how does. Best we can. Like, sort of, how would the FBI debunk ransom notes when they. When they get a ransom note and tell me, you know, what's the first red flag for the investigators?
- [02:10]
B
I don't know that there's a first red flag. I think, you know, it was. It's this thing called the fallacy of the beard. You look at what I got, it's like, say, well, how many hairs does it take to constitute a beard? I don't know, but I can tell you when you've got one. So at some point, they go, there's enough red flags here, but some things you're looking at. Is there a communication channel? Is there a way to negotiate with the. This person? What does the language say? Does it give me any proprietary information that only the person who kidnapped and took Nancy would know that nobody else would know. See, one of the biggest things here is people say what they described what she was wearing. Who knows what she was wearing and cannot authenticate what she was wearing at 2 o' clock in the morning. I mean, that's the thing I would look for. There was no camera working inside her house. We know there were cameras outside, but nothing working inside her house. So how would they know what she was wearing? Look, I've got an 84 year old mother in law. I could probably, within a certain level of confidence tell you what she probably wore, you know, tonight, what her night clothes are, but give me something specific. They said. Well, they described specifically where her Apple watch was.
- [03:10]
A
That's what I was going to ask about.
- [03:11]
B
Yeah, you know what, when you, the other thing that you go back and you look at when they did segments inside her bedroom with Savannah, they did it on the Today show, you can get a good idea, first of all, that you could see what she was wearing. I mean, I've got an Apple watch too. Right. I've done. Can't tell you how many new segments I've done. You know, been on national tv, been on cable, been on podcasts like yours. You. It would not, it's not hard to figure out this. Right. So, but the question is, so where she, where she charged it or where it was found? I don't want to say lucky guess, but I'm not saying that there's nothing. Okay, tell me something else. Tell me about a scar marker tattoo that Nancy has that nobody else would know except for the person who took her. There was never any proprietary information. That at least was that I saw in the public that said this person knows information nobody else does. Does. The one thing they could not prove again is what she was wearing to bed. I mean, did she wear the same clothes? I don't know. Did she change into her night clothes? I don't know either. Nobody knows. And that's the whole point. Nobody knows. So there's no way you can authenticate and have the news report. Well, they, they, they, they, they confirmed what she was wearing. The question is, how did you determine what she was wearing from the beginning? I refer to these as parasitic communication because that's what they did. They used deceit, manipulation and influence and sense of urgency and a loss of the family to do worst things, which is to use a criminal and you know, form of social engineering to get them to pay a ransom. But I said, you can't call it a ransom note unless you've established a Couple things. And one of the big things that's missing, it's a communication channel. Look, I. I worked in Colombia on plan Columbia. I've had friends on DEA down there, guys that. They made the show Narcos. After Steve Murphy and Javier Pena, they worked kidnappings. One of my friends was targeted by the cartel out of Mexico. They. I mean, these kidnap, ransom and extortion KR E Have specific patterns. And one of the ways you got to do it. One of the. One of the first things I saw that says this. This is going to have a tough time clearing that hurdle is when they sent it to tmz, because all that ensured you was that it would get a lot of publicity, which actually then in a very cruel way, created more pressure on the family. Because it's not now a negotiation. Below the radar, being done with the FBI. And we're going back and forth now. It's being handled on a national stage. With tmz.
- [05:29]
A
Well, yeah. And, you know, when it did sort of hit the tabloid, you know, of course, everybody was like, why would you go to tmz? I mean, why would. Why would it not be something going on behind the scenes with the family? Is that what you're talking about with this parasitic communication? I want you to define that for me.
- [05:48]
B
Well, parasitic is exactly what I mean. It's a parasite. It feeds off the host. When the guy took the camera, the nest camera off the door, it wasn't because of him trying to disguise him. He was already on the camera. It was because they didn't want anybody to see the vehicle.
- [06:01]
A
Okay?
- [06:02]
B
And we saw the blood stop right at the edge of the driveway. And what do we know? She was that clear indication. She was put into a vehicle. So they took advantage of all of those things to create this. Well, hey, we know where she's at. What does the family want more than anything else at that point? They want information about their mother. They want her returned.
- [06:19]
C
We still believe in a miracle. We still believe that she can come home. Hope against hope. As my sister says, we are blowing on the embers of hope.
- [06:34]
B
It's parasitic communications. They thrive off of the host. The host is the event, the family. I was out reporting for Fox, out for four days in Tucson. I talked to people on the ground. I had some friends that used to be on Tucson P.D. you know, I. From a professional standpoint, I talk to folks in the intel side, the law enforcement side. But having, you know, having looked at this, it was like there was nothing, nothing in there that told me this is A valid communication.
- [06:58]
A
What do you, what do you think about the language?
- [07:00]
B
So I think in this day and age of generative AI, we have to look at first, was this generated by AI? Was it used to disguise the person's origin? Look, I can tell you from spoken and. Well, not me personally, but I mean I could back in the day, I mean I working in Colombia, growing up in Iran, I spoke Farsi. I mean you could tell the difference between Farsi and Arabic. But these people that are in the behavior analysis unit, people I work with, that came out of the CIA, that were behavioral specialists that could listen to and look at how somebody wrote and tell you, here's their background, here's their degree, here's probably what area of the country they're living in. Because you look at idioms. Take a look at it. I mean, you say you're South Carolina, you have words down there we don't use up here in Northern Virginia, or we say things in Kansas they don't say in Florida. Like we used to call it popular. You go to other places, it's called soda. So just different idioms, you know, and idiosyncratic things in the language. So you start looking at those things, you start saying it's not just one thing, but it's a cluster of things. All the things that are being said. Does it indicate a certain background? Is it foreign, is it domestic, is it ethnic? You know, what's, what level of education do we assume the person is? Is it male or is it female? But you've got people that will look at this and they'll be able to look at the language and they'll say, is this consistent with all the other cases we've seen, all the other communications we have had? And I know they went back and they looked at it like it's hard to go find ransom communications that are public to where it was a one way missive. You throw it over the fence, you throw it to a media company. That's not how you do negotiations. So they're going to look at all sorts of things. They're going to look at wording, sentence structure, how punctuation was used. Look, it's like those scam emails you used to get that would had misspellings in there. And they say, give us your bank account information or I'll really. But now it's gotten so sophisticated with generative AI, the language is so precise. You can't use language anymore as a discriminator. You have to get into other things. Then the other thing you're looking at too. Final point here is you're looking at what was the origin of the communication. This has been one of the tougher ones because they've used a service that has made it very difficult to trace it back to the origin. The Internet has a return address. I don't care what you say. You might use an anonymous remailer, but it has to have a return address. And so you, you throw something out there. It has to originate from somewhere. Right. And that's. But somebody has been able to disguise the logs, the data that, that shows you how to trace the IP back to its origin.
- [09:22]
A
Okay, so why, how did they do that? Like, is that something that, that we've come across before? I mean, they're doing it to try and get money. I mean, they were asking for 4 million and then they were asking for 6 million in Bitcoin currency, correct?
- [09:37]
B
Yep.
- [09:39]
A
Is that why they're doing this? How, how hard is it to disguise where you're coming from? It. That to me sounds like pretty, pretty good.
- [09:47]
B
No, they've got, at least on that part, they've got good tradecraft. But to the point is, is that I don't want to, I'm not going to give away state secrets or tell anybody how to do it, but it doesn't take that long to go out and figure out how can I log into a service that's going to allow me to send an anonymous message that can't be traced. People have gotten wise at ones running these services. They run it also for people who do ransomware, people who do intrusions into people's computer systems, you know, the ways to disguise things. But if the FBI, who does counterterrorism, does counterintelligence, if they can't find the origin of it, it tells you, tells me a couple things. Not so much maybe that they're using good trade crap, but they've used a service which has been hardened against legal process and legal service.
- [10:31]
A
You know, talk to me about the other factors that the FBI would be using to, you know, trained to debunk these ransom notes. What are, what are they looking at?
- [10:42]
B
Yeah, I think. Well, it's so, so I, I grouped them into two groups of communications. The initial first two emails, that was a 4 million, then the 6 million, that to me is group one, that's a different one. None of those IP addresses have been tied to any of the IP addresses from the second set of communications, which I call group two. And that's the, the, the offender. I'll. Let's, let me Use a nice word. The offender who is sending these. Well, give me just one bitcoin. Give me this. That's. You know what that re. Weeks of desperation. Well, no, I'll really tell you. Look, in criminal cases, you don't get to make a plea unless you make a proffer. The first thing of the proffer is you got to give us something that's worth you getting a reduced sentence or worth getting the plea. Plea bargain for. You can't go. Well, give me the deal, and then I'll tell you. No, it doesn't work that way. I don't care who you are. I don't care how many crimes you think you can solve. You have to make a proffer. This guy couldn't proffer anything up. They asked him for a screenshot. He wouldn't deliver that well. No, you can trace me. Look, you've used a service that. First of all, they haven't been able to trace your email. You've set up a bitcoin or, you know, a crypto wallet. Those are not inconsequential things to do. So if you can do those, trust me, you can figure out a way to send a screenshot to validate, to send your bona fides, to show that, hey, yeah, you do. You do have what you. That's the proffer, right? They. They were able to provide no proffers.
- [11:55]
A
Well, I also want to talk just briefly about the language in these notes, about how the fear, the. The threat, the manipulation, just the. The. The awful ways. They talked about how, you know, Nancy Guthrie was going to be killed if they didn't come up with this money. Is that something that. That just raised a lot of flags, especially with no proof of life.
- [12:17]
B
Yeah. I mean, if. If you had given me a photo that says, here she is, you've got 48 hours. That sets the clock. That's a very real clock. But again, this is social engineering. This is exploitive social engineering, criminal social engineering, because social engineering gets you to take an action that is untrusted. But you. They want you to believe that it is trusted, and that's to give me money to prevent her from dying. That's one of the most emotional things I said early on. I don't remember who I was being interviewed by, but I said, this is one of the toughest decisions the family has to make is do we pay it or not?
- [12:49]
C
We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.
- [13:08]
A
Is there a way for the FBI to look at the pattern of what they did in this particular instance? So high profile, but still look at that pattern and possibly catch whoever had written these?
- [13:22]
B
So let me. Let me give you a historical case of why this could be done. Right? So during the World War II, the Germans had the Enigma machine. We had a tough time breaking the Enigma machine because we needed. Basically what we needed is give me a reference phrase, things that I know, so I can start comparing, you know, how letters are done, how things are done. Well, what they found out. Again, this goes back to behavior, right? You have to look at behaviors. So what were the Germans trained to do at the end of every message? At the end of every message, they said, heil Hitler. We now know that based on whatever message, the last two phrases in that were usually heil Hitler. Now they can use that to do cryptanalysis. They could decrypt those messages. So what you start looking with communications like this is you start going, is there something in here that is similar to messages we've seen on ransomware messages and other things? Did they use a turn of phrase the same way? Did they approach it the same way? People are creatures of habit. You will tend to write things and do things the same way and have a phrase that's unique to you. I'm sure you did it in the Murdoch case. You had things that were things that were unique to you. But if I heard that said, I wouldn't even have to hear your voice or know who you are. I could say, ah, that's Anne. Yeah, and that's. That's Anne. That's. I've heard her say that before. I've heard her use that phrase. Mine is, people will know. When I sign off on my show, Crime Reconstructed, I always go, it doesn't matter what you believe. It only matters what must be true. That's. I mean, so you could hear that. And you go, I know you, but I will tell you the biggest. The biggest mistake made in this case was not only public sizing the fact that they got these notes, but it was in. But anytime that you keep putting it on the air, what does it do? It encourages them to send yet another note. Why? Because they know it'll get on the air. I ask you, when's the last time you've seen a streaker in a nationally televised sporting event?
- [15:03]
A
Oh, no, it's been a.
- [15:07]
B
Why? Because it encourages bad behavior. If you get on. If you get on the air, Guess what? Somebody else is going to do it. So what do they quit doing? They quit showing protests. They quit showing these streakers to quit enabling bad behavior. This was the enablement of bad behavior that ensured that you were going to get additional communications, get additional clicks, and put it on the air. I mean, that to me, was. If you talk about respecting the family, it should never been put on the air. Why? Because it took away time, resources, investigators from actually tracking down the person. Instead, they had to deal with this bunk.
- [15:39]
A
Is there any other reason for a targeted abduction like this that you can. You can fathom besides wanting just money?
- [15:46]
C
Greed?
- [15:48]
B
I don't. Well, if you look at the victimology, if you look at her life, she's. All of these people are talking about like it's a wrench attack. It's a crypto attack. No, they've got. This is just throwing a bunch of crap up against the wall, hoping something sticks so they can get more views and get you. Look, I'm hard on people who do this stuff. I'll tell you this right now. I've turned down interviews because I don't want to be associated with a certain narrative or certain stuff. I don't mind coming on and saying, hey, this is my point of view. If you don't like it, that's okay. But I am. I am tough on people who are simply out there just throwing stuff up against the wall because it generates additional clicks, generates additional stuff, and we have to be. Every time you do that, you're being dishonest to the family. You're being dishonest to the victim. If you really want to serve the case, do what's right for the case. So I look at this stuff and I go, there is nothing out there right now that tells me it's anything other than a targeted abduction. I. And beyond that, I can't tell you. I won't. I won't say. Well, I think it might be this. I don't know.
- [16:46]
A
I'm there with you on that. I think what I was trying to understand in my head is a target abduction. Yes.
- [16:53]
B
But why?
- [16:54]
A
But. But why? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I know I'm not without anything to. To lean on, but see, that's like you're saying, I just need.
- [17:04]
B
That's the system. One thinking people want an answer. Give me an answer. Have it make sense. And like, I'm telling folks, the hardest thing to do in an investigation is say these three words. I don't know. I don't know. You don't want me to. I can make up.
- [17:16]
A
I don't know. How's that?
- [17:17]
B
Yeah. Yeah, I know. I don't know.
- [17:19]
A
Maybe we can get back on track to find the people that took Nancy Guthrie. Because in the end, it's just. It is a heartbreaking case, but it's also one that needs to be solved.
- [17:30]
B
Well, it needs to be solved for all the other people who don't get the national attention. That's the purpose of the National Center. Sometime, if you want to do that, you know, we can talk about how we've changed the game, right? In other words, you can't connect the dots unless you collect the dots. The dots all have to be in one place. So Nancy Guthrie, while she got attention, you know who didn't get attention? 26,000 other people that are sitting in NAMUS right now that could have used that same visibility to help solve their case. So I have some heartburn over that because. Yeah, that's why I created the system. That's why we're DOJ funded. It's to fill that gap between how do the police and the public work together.
- [18:04]
A
Drop a comment below. I want to hear your thoughts about these ransom notes. Do you think that the kidnappers are hiding behind one of them? Be sure to like and subscribe. Turn on your notifications. We'll be updating all of the cases that you're obsessed with.