Did Nancy Guthrie's Investigators Already Lose Their Only Shot?

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Now, here's another uncomfortable possibility. We've heard two things this week from various sources. One, one person's sources are telling them they're very close. Others are like, we're at a dead end. We're going to address both in two different segments here. First, we're going to talk about dead end, that nobody's close to anything. Howard Blum is reporting in Air Mail, lays it out. Investigators themselves are scared. An early screw up costs them the case. Suspects hauled in and let go. Every lead, dead ending. The task force crawling back to the ransom notes because they've got nothing better. Brian Enten sources say the same thing. The kidnapper vanished as clearly as Nancy did. Jennifer Coffindaffer is with myself and Robin Drake to help break down this end of it. Let's talk about Howard Blum's reporting from Air Mail. Howard's been on the show, I think, last time he was on, we were talking about Kohbeger.
But Blum has reported the agents themselves are afraid an early mistake costs them any shot at solving this. Forget whether they're right when investigators start saying that about their own case out loud, even anonymously.
You guys are retired FBI agents. How do you read that? Let's start with you, Jen.

**Jennifer Coffindaffer** (1:27)
Well, look, look at where we're at. We're at four and a half months. Again, I predicted a six month case very early on, only because, only because the night situation there, trying to figure out where the vehicle was, knowing the IA time to sit there and watch and look at the analysts, meaning watching and looking at all this footage that would have come in, the DNA issues that we knew very early on. They talked about three profiles in one, so we knew that that wasn't going to work, but then they had this rootless hair that the FBI acknowledged. That's one of the true pieces of information, data points, that is, we've got that. We know that, that is always going to take months to analyze and to do IGG on because that's the only way you can do it. We don't know what other DNA they have in there, and we don't even know if they have it, if it's really connected, or they just did it in hopes of it being connected. So all these things, in other words, I'm not panicking, not panicking, I'm never going to panic, but the six-month mark is where I'm going to be scrunching my face more. I think a lot of this just takes time.
Dead end, nothing is at a dead end when you have roads. So there's all these roads that the FBI is going down, nothing telling us there is a dead end, nothing. We've still got the pictures of Porch Guy, we've got the DNA, we've got the video footage that they should be going through, we've got all the hints that have come in, we've got the Bitcoin that could still lead to something, and then we've also got the IP addresses that led to those notes. So those aren't dead ends, those are roads that are being traveled. So I think it's going to be solved. I don't believe there's dead ends, they're just frustrated because there's, they're not getting where they want to go fast enough.
Yeah.

**Robin Drake** (3:28)
Yeah. Go ahead, Tony.

**Tony Brueski** (3:29)
No, you go ahead. You got one, Robin?

**Robin Drake** (3:32)
My concern with everything is, I'm not concerned, I'm curious whether the internal confusion matches the external confusion. Because if you have a good, strong leader that's leading the investigation, you can make sense of all the chaos that's going on, all the leads that are coming in. Because like Jen is saying, if you got lots of leads coming in, there's still lots of things be flushed out. But if you don't have some of a lot of reps and experience about how to manage and triage properly, you're going to spin around and waste a lot of time just trying to figure out what to do next, and what's this, and who's saying this. I mean, literally what we're doing here is what I'm hoping that they're not doing there because this is the most confusing thing I've ever seen, we've ever covered.
And a large part of that is because no one seems to be taking lead in communication, no one's taking lead on what's truth and veracity here, what we should ignore, what we shouldn't ignore. I mean, whoever's in charge, and as I'm saying, whoever's in charge, because I really don't know, is letting the ether continually populate crap all over the place. Here's what would be really helpful for everyone following this. Someone in a position of knowing to say, this is not real, this is not real, this is not real. Just give us something to work with so we don't feel like I feel, and that is if they're as confused as I am, they're screwed. That's what I'm hoping.