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The Trial: USA
Nancy Guthrie abduction: Are we any closer to knowing what really happened? (edited)
00:27:15
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- [00:03]
Chris McDonough
The crime desk arresting podcasts.
- [00:09]
Savannah Guthrie
Hi there everybody. I wanted to come on and just share a few thoughts as we enter into another week of this nightmare. I just want to say, first of all, thank you so much for all of the prayers and the love that we have felt, my sister and brother and I, and that our mom has felt. Because we believe that somehow, some way, she is feeling these prayers and that God is lifting her. Even in this moment and in this darkest place, we believe our mom is still out there. We need your help. Law enforcement is working tirelessly around the clock trying to bring her home, trying to find her. She was taken and we don't know where and we need your help. So I'm coming on just to ask you, not just for your prayers, but no matter where you are, even if you're far from Tucson, if you see anything, you hear anything, if there's anything at all that seems strange to you that you report to law enforcement. We are at an hour of desperation and we need your help.
- [01:51]
Kayla Brantley
That was Savannah Guthrie in an emotional plea posted to her Instagram earlier this week. She spoke out again publicly as the investigation into her mother, Nancy Guthrie's disappearance intensified. The message came just a day before the FBI released new evidence. A video showing a possible suspect and expanded its role, a clear sign that this case has entered a more aggressive phase. The footage shows a masked figure wearing black latex gloves, carrying a backpack and what appears to be a gun. The individual seems to be tampering with Nancy's doorbell camera in the hours before she disappeared from the Tucson home she's lived in for over 50 years. And overnight, another major development. A man detained near the Mexican border in connection with Nancy Guthrie's abduction has now been released after authorities carried out a court ordered search of the property where he had been staying in Rio Rico Arizon. Delivery driver Carlos Palazzuelos was taken into custody following a traffic stop south of Tucson. He later told reporters he was informed he was being detained for kidnapping. But by early Wednesday morning, he was no longer in custody and he spoke out to maintain his innocence. Federal agents now say they are examining multiple persons of interest following a surge of tips. FBI Director Kash Patel confirming the bureau is working to identify and eliminate anyone potentially connected. All of this is unfolding as local SWAT teams, the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, and additional federal resources are deployed. We're learning that a bitcoin account was set up and mentioned in a ransom note demanding $6 million in Bitcoin. That account reportedly showed some activity, but we now know there is less than $300 in that account, despite the Guthrie saying they would pay. So what does the release of this detained individual actually tell us? Does the activity in that crypto account mean something? Or and do the police know more than they're telling us? We'll break down every development from the past 24 hours and what investigators have confirmed, what remains uncertain and where this case could be heading next, coming up shortly. I'm Kayla Brantley, and this is the Trial usa. We'll be back in just a moment.
- [04:16]
Savannah Guthrie
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- [06:40]
Kayla Brantley
I'm joined by Chris McDonough, retired homicide detective of 25 years. Chris, you've solved 300 murders, dealt with 500 death cases, and now you work for the Cold Case Foundation. I want to jump right into the newly released doorbell footage. We got still images, we got footage, and it shows a masked figure wearing black latex gloves, carrying a backpack, what appears to be a gun. The individual seems to be tampering with Nancy's doorbell camera. And this was in the hours just before she disappeared from her Tucson home. Can we dive into that? What do you make of this footage when you first see it?
- [07:23]
Chris McDonough
Thank you, Kayla, for the invitation, by the way. I appreciate that very much. So if we take a look, you know, at this individual. So let's first start off with what I'll call the victim risk continuum, okay? And what I mean by that is if you take the letter L for an example, okay? And on this side you say environment, situation, circumstance, okay? But on this side you go low, medium, high risk. And so you ask yourself a question. What's the environment? Well, it's her house, okay. What's the situation? Well, she's sound asleep at possibly 2 o' clock in the morning. She's 84 years old. She's in her bedroom. She's in her home, okay? And she was dropped off at some point by somebody. And so now what's the circumstance? Well, she. She's vanished, okay? And there's blood on the front porch that has come back DNA to Nancy Guthrie. So now you ask the second question. Is, are all of these, is the environment a low, medium or high risk environment? Well, that's a very low risk environment. She's at home in bed. Same with the situation. But what's the circumstance? Well, she's disappeared, okay? So, so you move that maybe between the middle, the medium and low risk, okay, at that point, okay, now you take that same theory and you apply it to two o' clock in the morning. There's a high crime rate. And if everything moves to the right to higher risk to the victim, okay, then that tells us that particular victim potentially could be a target of opportunity. But if everything stays to the left, statistically there's a. A theory that says, well, then that individual was probably known and, or associated to the perpetrator. Meaning there had to be some type of path that crossed. And in this case, it could be, you know, the pool guy, it could be anybody that worked on the house. It could Be neighbors, it could be friends, it could be, you know, folks in the, in the nearby arena.
- [09:55]
Kayla Brantley
Yeah, well, in most cases that you've seen, are the suspects usually somehow related to the victim? Like how common is it that this would just be a random untargeted attack where somebody was just walking by and decided to attack Nancy Guthrie's house?
- [10:13]
Chris McDonough
Yeah, well, that's a great question. And so if we look at Elizabeth mark, there's a 14 year old girl sound asleep in her bedroom and a guy comes through the window. But who was he? He was the guy that had, you know, contact with the family before. So that's the association, that's what I'm saying. Okay, so if it's not going to surprise me that there's something connecting that house. So as an investigator, you don't you want to stay at that house until you have flushed all those things out? Okay, so now we then get this video of this guy all suited up like, you know, you've described him. Okay. And we then have to say, okay, what's going on here? Because later all of a sudden these ransom letters start showing up. You know, we've got Nancy. And at first it was almost like the payment plan, okay, if you give her back to us, you know, by this date, okay, it's only 4 million, okay? But if you miss that date and you go to this date, well, we've upped the price to 6 million. Okay? So that level of unsophistication is a clue. And if we look at today now, another letter has apparently come in. I think there's from an investigative analysis aspect. You have to sit back and you say, okay, there's two trains running here and they've both left the station. I'm going to stay on the train personally at the house. And here's the reason why. If you look at this guy, we have to think to ourselves, okay, how does this guy just show up at 2 o' clock in the morning at an 84 year old woman's house whose daughter happens to be one of the most high profile journalist out there. Every single morning, millions of people watch her. And this guy randomly knows where her mother lives. And he's so sophisticated, allegedly, that he gets to her front porch and realizes there's a camera. And then he says, you know what, I'll just grab a bunch of weeds, okay, and cover the lens.
- [12:33]
Kayla Brantley
So you're saying he, this is not a sophisticated professional. Like when you look at the, the gloves, when you look at the masks, the, the gun in the holster Everything about that to you is saying that this. I mean, maybe it was thought out, but it wasn't.
- [12:47]
Chris McDonough
Yeah.
- [12:47]
Kayla Brantley
It wasn't properly executed.
- [12:49]
Chris McDonough
Right. And then you think about the other piece of that. You know, we'll talk about the gun that you mentioned there for a second. Okay. First of all, it looks like an automatic potential. And could it be a replica? We don't know. Okay. Not yet. Okay. But the holster that it's in. Okay. Is a holster for a revolver. It's not even the right holster. And the way he's positioned it, you know, in front of him, it's like, you know, this guy is apparently not fired very many guns. Okay. Because the gun is positioned like this. Okay. In the front. But. Whereas, if you see the whole reason the military, law enforcement, and all those people that are trained carry the gun on the side is because you go like this, right? From here to here. You don't do this.
- [13:41]
Kayla Brantley
Right. You don't grab it. You grab it from the side to pull up forward. You don't grab it from the front to pull up forward.
- [13:46]
Chris McDonough
It's unnatural, because that's a split second.
- [13:49]
Kayla Brantley
Right.
- [13:49]
Chris McDonough
Okay. So those are the kind of things you got to think about where just, you know, we're focusing on the backpack for a moment. Okay. Yes. That looks like he's got stuff in there. And there could be various reasons for that. Okay. He doesn't have a piece of tape that all he had to do is rip the tape and cover the doorbell. Okay. We don't see him in that video tearing the doorbell off.
- [14:18]
Kayla Brantley
We're taking a quick break after this.
- [14:30]
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- [15:00]
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- [15:30]
Kayla Brantley
I want to talk a bit about some theories that we're now seeing online. Now that we have this footage and these still photos. You know, we have these online juvenile investigators who are looking at, you know, the shape of the eyes. Was that a beard that you see or a mustache through the mask? Do you think this helps or hinders the investigation now having these photos out there and the potential for all of these theories to arise?
- [16:01]
Chris McDonough
You know, I think it. It was a good move to put the video out there right now. I don't think I. I think they should have put actually a little bit more of it to. Into the public domain. And the reason I say that is, you know, one of the things that is necessary for the family, you know, during communications, was proof of life. Right. Well, first of all, you have to know if she left that house alive, and if they have that on video, they need to show that to the family, because now that tells the world, guess what? Nancy Guthrie is out there. Okay. But if they're holding it so far to the chest, then that creates these kind of problems. Well, you know, it could be a woman. It could be this person. It could be that person. And so the. The natural tendency of anybody is to try to fill in that gap of understanding. Well, you can nip that really fast in an investigation. I've worked a lot of high profile investigations on a national level. I mean, I've walked out of crime scenes where back in the day, there were, like, 15, 20 satellite trucks from around the world. Okay, so my. My career is in Southern California, so we had a lot of volume. So sometimes you have to release information that will also tell us that. That blood on the porch. If you see her passing that threshold during the abduction side of us, well, that makes sense. And people can go, okay, we got to take the blood off the table here for discussion, because it belongs to this Guthrie, and it will also give us an idea of what her health condition was when she left that house. But because we're not seeing that, we're only seeing some guy who goes up and puts weeds on a doorbell. And not even the fact that he tore it off. At what point does he tear it off? Is there a second person that tore it off? We don't know these things.
- [18:10]
Kayla Brantley
Well, it did also take over a week for the authorities to release this footage. There was an issue Where Nancy Guthrie didn't have the Nest subscription, so they had to contact Nest and final. Get it. But the Guthrie family, you know, Savannah has said it herself that they believe she is alive and that she's still out there. So it's very possible that the family has seen further video. And one thing I wanna turn to is the investigation because authorities have been catching a lot of heat for how they've handled this, for releasing the crime scene and then, you know, closing it back up for further investigation, for not putting as much information out there. In your experience, do you believe the cops actually know more than they're leading on? Because we just had a detainment yesterday of a delivery driver that they questioned that then, you know, said, I have no idea who this is, and he was released. So do you think authorities know more than they're leading on, or does it seem like they just have no way to turn here?
- [19:17]
Chris McDonough
No, I believe they have a tremendous amount of more information. And, you know, they're keeping it in because, you know, to the sheriff's comments, you know, they. They want to just have that information for when they get to the interview room, for lack of a better term. Okay, that only thing, that. Only things the suspect would know. But for the public, right? You need to feed the public and the media, because that's your responsibility, right? As the media, your responsibility is to tell the public, okay, this is what's really happening. This is the truth. Okay? Now, we can't tell you everything, but here's some of the things we can say. And if we hear in the. You'll notice in the very beginning of this thing, the day I saw that crime scene tape come off within a couple of days, I was like, okay, this is not. There's something wrong here. Because then when you go back and you see these guys keep returning, okay, well, you can hold a crime scene as long as you need it, as long as you have a judge who said, yeah, hold the crime scene. In this case, they were looking for a missing woman. That was their first impression, that she was just. Maybe she walked off or whatever. On the search and rescue, that's called extra driven circumstances. So the law allows you to hold that house and that area for a while. But the moment you see blood on the porch and the moment you say, okay, we tested this blood In a rapid DNA, oh, by the way, this belongs to Ms. Guthrie. Now, you have potentially a crime. So you get a search warrant, you shut the house down, and you figure out, okay, what do we need to do here? Do we need resources. You know, is this a kidnapping? What do we have here? And then the letter came in.
- [21:10]
Kayla Brantley
So you believe that the cops are being very methodical with what they are releasing. They've released this photo, They've released the video. From a suspect standpoint, are they hoping to spook the suspect? You know, now their photo and video is out there of, you know, their face obviously concealed, but it's something.
- [21:29]
Chris McDonough
Yes. I mean, you. If you think about putting ourselves in that individual's mind. I have a really hard time right now to connect the bitcoin ransom with this guy poking around the house.
- [21:45]
Kayla Brantley
And why is that?
- [21:46]
Chris McDonough
Well, first of all, if you just look at the sophistication of this guy, you know, he chooses two o' clock in the morning, a very vulnerable victim like Ms. Guthrie. He doesn't even know how to cover a camera. If he's going to take her out of that house, where does he put her? If there's a second guy, Bob, you get the car, pull it around, I'm bringing her out. Or the third scenario is, okay, the car has been positioned outside somewhere. Let's go, we're going to the car. And now he has to manage this 84 year old, frail woman who's been described that she has difficulty walking. She has a pacemaker, she has medications. Okay, so now this guy has to say, all right, I've had this whole plan here. I'm going to take her out of the house, I'm going to kidnap her, and I have a health management plan simultaneously with this woman, because they're going to give me the million dollars in bitcoin, and there's no way that's going to be traced. And Mrs. Guthrie, when I get the bitcoin, I'm going to wait 12 hours and I'm going to return you back to the family. Now, mind you, this is the same guy that grabbed weeds to cover a door camera.
- [23:11]
Kayla Brantley
So are you saying that the person on the footage seems very unsophisticated, but the ransom letters seem more sophisticated?
- [23:21]
Chris McDonough
Yeah, I think the ransom letters are generated by AI they're too structurally sound. If you listen to the folks that have talked about them. Okay, it's almost like you ask, you know, AI create a ransom letter for 6 million in Bitcoin and then put some of the details of the crime scene in it. It's almost like it's too much. And so when you start seeing that kind of stuff flow, then you start asking yourself, okay, well, let's go back to the house and find out who's in the circle and who's in the circle here? All of a sudden, this guy pops up in Los Angeles, this gentleman who's been arrested for fake ransom letters. But if you read the affidavit that the feds have on this guy, in the affidavit, you know, he asked a question. Here's what he says. Did you get the bitcoin? We're waiting on our end for the transaction. So the guy in Los Angeles, the fraudster, is asking a question in a text message to who? He sends it to Savannah's sister and her brother in law. So let's. Let's just play with this thought for a moment. Okay. First of all, Savannah is the spokesperson for the family. And if you're randomly doing Google searches, anybody can do that. We get that in today's technology.
- [24:59]
Kayla Brantley
Let's look at the ransom notes and the ransom letters.
- [25:02]
Chris McDonough
Sure.
- [25:03]
Kayla Brantley
How do you verify the credibility of them? The ones that have been sent to the local stations, the ones that it appears the police are taking seriously, how do you verify those?
- [25:13]
Chris McDonough
You have to take a look at what the suspect said in those ransom letters. I mean, there. There had to be details in there that correlate with details at the crime scene. But it doesn't mean that they're holding her. We don't know what her proof of life is. And that's why they haven't answered that question in. In any hostage negotiation. Rule number one, proof of life.
- [25:40]
Kayla Brantley
Well, according to the siblings and Savannah Guthrie, it appears that there has been enough proof of life for them to say that they believe she is still out there and they're will to work with whoever's holding her. And they're also willing to pay. So I do think there is some more detail, and there has been some type of proof of life that we don't know about.
- [25:59]
Chris McDonough
Yeah, well, that's possible, but I think, you know, in my experience, that dialogue wouldn't have ended on Monday. And today, this note coming in, again, you had this concept. And by the way, I spent 11 years as a hostage negotiator. That was a. An auxiliary position that I had. So I was in homicide, but, you know, kind of a. An auxiliary position whenever there was a problem. Some of us, you know, on my agency were doing that. And so this was a classic situation where they were trying to create emotion. That is, they were trying to personalize Nancy. Okay. And then the second situation is, we need to know that Nancy's alive. We need to know this. And then the third situation was, you Notice there's a mixed messaging here. Savannah was the first spokesperson, and then her brother was the second spokesperson, and then they went back to Savannah as the spokesperson again. Well, that point of contact is confusing in of itself. If you're the suspect at the other end, you're hearing Savannah, you go, okay, she's the one I'm going to talk to. And then the brother comes out and says, well, now I'm the spokesperson for the family. And the suspect goes, oh, okay, I'll talk to him.
- [27:22]
Kayla Brantley
Do you have any insights into negotiation tactics that you can share with us? If you were dealing with this case and they're demanding $6 million in Bitcoin, what tactics would you deploy to. Would you be following the bank account or the email address that these notes came from?
- [27:40]
Chris McDonough
Yeah, there's ways to unfold the IP addresses. Just like they thought that the video that we're seeing now was gone, all of a sudden it showed up. So that's the same thing that's going on behind the scenes. And one of the interesting things that I think we should point out here, and I had mentioned it a week ago, I said, I think the feds are going to do a head fake. And what I meant by that is this. They're going to drop a couple of bucks into the bitcoin, and the moment the suspect hits that wallet, they're going to be able to go, okay, we have movement.
- [28:22]
Kayla Brantley
Well, we do know there's been $300 in that Bitcoin account.
- [28:26]
Chris McDonough
Okay, and the movement on that, where did the cops go? They went to the nearby gas station. And guess what's in that gas station? A bitcoin ATM machine. So then you have to ask yourself a question. Wait a minute. Were they waiting? Because they came right in and said, give us the CCTV film. And now they have a car. And that's going to be the key to this whole case, in my opinion. Right now, you find the car, you will find the perpetrators, because they had to move her. They had to move her. And if that's the case, then that vehicle is in play. Which leads to another question. Whose cars are impounded right now in this whole case in the last eight days, 10 days.
- [29:21]
Kayla Brantley
My last question for you, how close do you think police are to solving this?
- [29:26]
Chris McDonough
Well, they're holding vehicles for a reason, and that's Annie's vehicle that's sitting in an impound yard right now. Why? And then second to that is they went over to their house and they collected evidence out of that house. They came out of there with bags. Why? What's going on there? So I think there's again that there's two trains that left the station. You have the feds handling all the ransom stuff, the bitcoin stuff, getting all the fraudsters. But over here you have the sheriff department who called in the homicide guys the very first day. They're running a separate train. So it's kind of like this head thing. Get everybody over here while we work over here. That's what I think's happening.
- [30:15]
Kayla Brantley
All right, well, thank you so much for being with us, Chris McDonough.
- [30:19]
Chris McDonough
Thank you for the invite.
- [30:22]
Kayla Brantley
If you want to stay up to date on the biggest trials unfolding across the country, the evidence, the testimony and what happens next, make sure you're following the Trial usa wherever you listen. This is the Trial usa. I'm Kayla Brantley. Thank you for being with us.
- [30:52]
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