EXCLUSIVE: Nancy Guthrie

**Ashley Flowers** (0:00)
Hi, Crime Junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and I'm dropping in your feed today with a special guest.

**Briana Whitney** (0:07)
Hi, everyone, I'm Briana Whitney.

**Ashley Flowers** (0:09)
For those of you who don't follow us on social or catch our content on YouTube, first of all, you've been missing out. But second, and importantly, you might not know that Briana has recently joined the Crime Junkie team as our breaking news reporter. We have, you guys know this, an amazing team of investigative journalists who help me bring you our weekly episodes. Each one of those takes months to produce, and we need a lot of information to cover a story in full length. Nine times out of 10, a lot of investigation means the case has been open or worked for a long time. But I am also constantly following breaking stories. Like I know you guys are too. I see you in my DMs. I see you in our Facebook group. You want to talk and hear about stories that are unfolding in real time. Well, prayers answered. And Briana now does a weekly episode on YouTube covering true crime cases that are making headlines. I am crashing her episode today because this is one that I had to talk about with you.
Now, regularly, your episodes are very much kind of like my solo episodes and like weirdly people think we kind of look alike, which like I hadn't planned, but like you'll be a comforting presence to our Crime Junkies.
Now, you guys, I have been following Briana for years, almost like the same time I started podcasting, you started at Arizona Family, right? And deep tracks, I got a personal recommendation about how amazing that you were from Sarah Turney, who told me that if I ever got the chance to hire you, I should jump on it. It took me a couple of years to get you, but I'm so happy that you're here now. And I'm especially grateful that you're here right now, because at the six month anniversary of Nancy Guthrie's kidnapping, when all eyes are on this case, you have the inside track. You're like the person.

**Briana Whitney** (1:52)
I lived it. This is a lived experience for me on this case. So I'm obviously excited to be at Crime Junkie, and this happened right before I got here. But the reason I have the inside track on everything is because I was reporting at an Arizona news station, and it was like one of those alerts that came in where it's like, Nancy Guthrie is missing, Savannah Guthrie's mom, there's like a search for her. And I literally remember me and my friends texting about it, like, this is odd. Like, okay, but people go missing all the time, right? So we're like, okay, this is weird. Like, they'll probably find her strange. We are up in Phoenix. This is happening in Tucson. And I never could have predicted what would unfold from there. I lived the Nancy Guthrie investigation pretty much 24-7 for about a month. And I learned what was in those ransom notes that were sent to the media outlets because they were sent to a news station that was part of the company that I worked for. And so that shaped kind of our knowledge of the reporting behind the scenes. And now information has started to trickle out.
People are learning a little bit more about what they say. But I'm at the point now where it has been six months.
Most of what has happened on the investigative side of things happened in the first month, really, of the case unfolding. Yes, I know there's a lot going on behind the scenes, but there's all these like inside sources that are reporting this and reporting that, and it's hard, because there's been no press conference since week one, which is insane.

**Yvette Gentile** (3:17)
Kind of wild, yeah.

**Briana Whitney** (3:18)
Not kind of. I mean, it is crazy to me still that there hasn't been more.
But at this point, I'm like, okay, there's inside sources coming out with things, but I know this stuff. And I think the Crime Junkies want to hear it, too.
There's been no arrests. She's still missing. So I thought, why don't we just get into everything that the ransom notes say? I want to tell you about what happened behind the scenes with authorities, with the sheriff. And then what I think people also really want to know is like, how could this happen? Is there a possibility of what we could know, right? And there's this retired chief investigator I interviewed who has this, what I think, a very credible theory as to how this plan unfolded, how it was carried out and why we might be at this place where there's kind of this stall, right? We don't know where Nancy is. There's been no arrests. So where do you go from here? And we really dive deep into it. And I know the Crime Junkies are gonna want to hear this.