Nancy Guthrie Case: Legal Analyst Addresses Why the Family May Have Chosen Not to Pay the Ransom

Nancy Guthrie has been missing since February 1. The 84-year-old grandmother is believed to have been abducted from her Tucson, Arizona, home in the middle of the night, and there have been no major breakthroughs in her case. With each passing day, concern for Nancy grows, especially because she is known to have had health problems. 

At the beginning of the case, the public was informed that the kidnappers had shared a ransom note. They requested $6 millionin Bitcoin, which the Guthrie family is believed to have not paid. Later, the family, including Nancy’s daughter, “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie, informed the public that the reward for their mother had been increased to $1 million for information leading to her safe return. Members of the public have been confused by this sequence of events and believe that if the family were able to pay that much, why did they not simply pay what the kidnappers were asking and have Nancy returned to them?

Nancy Guthrie’s Ransom Note & Discrepancies 

Getty

Legal commentator Nancy Grace reacted to the ransom and the family’s decision regarding it in an interview on the “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” podcast, Parade reports. “[There’s] a lot of people attacking Savannah — ‘Why did you pay the ransom? Why didn’t you pay sooner? Why didn’t you this, that?’ There’s no script for what you’re supposed to do. I think Savannah and her brother and sister, Annie and Camron, did everything they were physically able to do at that moment,” Grace said. 

She continued, “Savannah, in her interview [on Today], stated that they got many, many quite fake ransoms, but that she believes those two to which she responded—she believes they were real. I know Savannah well enough that when she gave a response—twice, she responded—she would not have done that if she did not believe the ransom notes were real.” 

The remarks Grace is referring to were made by Savannah during an interview on “Today” with her co-host and friend, Hoda Kotb. “There are a lot of different notes, I think that came. And I think most of them, it’s my understanding, are not real,” she said. “And I didn’t see them. But a person that would send a fake ransom note really has to look deeply at themselves. To a family in pain. But I believe the two notes that we received that we responded to, I tend to believe those were real.”

Why Nancy Guthrie’s Family Reportedly Did Not Pay Her Ransom

Getty

“I think the reason they didn’t pay—if, in fact, they didn’t, and I don’t believe they did—is because they never got proof of life,” Grace shared. She also discussed how the ransom did not arrive immediately, which seemed unusual because most kidnappers would want to receive the money right away. “You want the money, then you want it to be over with—you want to get the hell out of town,” she said. 

“Proof of life is everything. They need to have a dialogue, and the family’s looking for a dialogue with these kidnappers,” Michael Harrigan told The Post Sunday, Page Six reports in February.

The Guthrie siblings had stated early in their mother’s disappearance that they would pay the ransom. “We beg you now to return our mother to us, so that we can celebrate with her,” Savannah said in a video shared on Instagram. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.” 

Former CIA and FBI agent Tracy Walder told Page Six that the ransom note was created by someone who had put planning into the decision. “This is someone who said, ‘I am going to sit down. This is how I’m going to encrypt the email, this is the VPN I’m going to use.’ They put some plan into this,” she said.

The post Nancy Guthrie Case: Legal Analyst Addresses Why the Family May Have Chosen Not to Pay the Ransom appeared first on EntertainmentNow.