Nancy Guthrie was abducted by a ‘strangely unprofessional amateur’ criminal, according to a former FBI agent.
The 84-year-old mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie was taken on February 1 ‘against her will’ in a ‘targeted’ crime, according to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and FBI.
Footage from a doorbell camera at Nancy’s home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, Arizona, captured a masked individual carrying a backpack approaching her porch shortly before it was disconnected.
Despite significant law enforcement resources being deployed, her family offering up to $1 million for information and the case attracting blanket news coverage, her whereabouts remain unknown three months on.
As the trail remained cold, Chip Massey, a former FBI special agent who worked as a hostage negotiator, claimed the footage suggested the suspect wasn’t an ‘experienced criminal’.
‘The way he tries to get lower to disguise his gait and height, how he tries to cover up the camera, that’s not something an experienced criminal would do,’ he told the Daily Mail.
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‘His gun holster is problematic. It doesn’t fit, and you would never wear it there, on the front, where someone can grab your weapon.
‘And those gloves are too big for him to use the gun anyway.
‘The fact blood was on the exit tells me there was a struggle inside.
‘If he was a professional that wouldn’t have happened, so that tells me he’s an amateur, as does the whole back and forth afterwards (with ransom notes) where they don’t provide proof of life.’
Chip said that kidnappings tend to be carried out by organised crime gangs but the person in the footage looked ‘strangely unprofessional’.
Since her disappearance, at least three ransom notes, demanding millions of dollars in crypto, have been delivered.
They claimed to know the kidnappers’ identities and have footage of ‘the day she died’.
This, combined with a lack of evidence that the grandmother is alive, has fuelled speculation that she may already have died.
While initially the notes were treated as real, a senior FBI official told Reuters last week that ‘none of the ransom notes are believed to be genuine.’
An official FBI statement released the next day clarified this wasn’t the case for all the notes.
It read: ‘The FBI and its task force partners have received several ransom notes over the course of this investigation.
‘Some have been deemed to be extortion attempts without legitimacy.
‘Other ransom demands may potentially be legitimate and are still being investigated as such.
‘This case continues to be investigated as a kidnapping for ransom case.’
Since the disappearance, her daughter Savannah, 54, has made several emotional public pleas alongside her family to try and get her mother back safely.
In one, she said: ‘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.’