Murdaugh’s DNA, Reiner’s Trust, Guthrie’s Ransom — What You Haven’t Heard

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live, with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:11)
You know, you just shake your head sometimes. You just do, because there's so much information that's coming in, in the Nancy Guthrie case, from so many different places. And the places that should be solid sources sometimes are, sometimes aren't. Sometimes this means something, sometimes that means something. At the end of the day, an 84-year-old grandmother with a heart condition was taken out of her own home in the dead of night. Five months later, no body, no arrest, no answer. Harvey Levin offered to pay the Bitcoin ransom himself and track the money on camera. The FBI, he says, ghosted him for a month and told him to stand down because they're making progress. Meanwhile, today, this morning, this is new. Sheriff Nanos decided to get up, have a cup of coffee and go on local radio and tell people, quote, I think, this is the quote, quote, I think, dot, dot, dot, the FBI has done a number of arrests for fake ransom notes, he thinks.
The sheriff running this investigation isn't sure what the FBI is doing on his own case.
That's where we're beginning this week. Robin Dreeke, retired FBI special agent, former chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program is with us to help us break all of this down I think the headline this morning is is NADOS and I don't know if it's a headline and I don't like jumping on to things that we don't know a lot about but it is the story he is an official with power in this case saying that I think the FBI has done a number of arrests for or fake ransom notes. He thinks Robin, what's your read on that?

**Robin Dreeke** (1:52)
That's something you just shouldn't say.
Yes, yes, to think, you know, when you, it's nothing but a caveat, you know, it's a qualifier for, you know, it's a qualifier. It is. He's qualifying things that are coming out of his mouth. In other words, it's given him the ability to backtrack it if it's not true.
If you're in a position of knowledge, authority, leadership on an investigation, any investigation, the last thing you do is present possibilities to an audience. You present facts, data and details to an audience. I mean, here's an example. So when my team, when we would do a behavioral assessment for a case agent in the field across the country, we did hundreds a year. And here's what we would do. We would go into the field office, we'd get all the materials ahead of time that we possibly could from the case agent, from language specialists, from subpoenas, FISAs, all this thing. I'd spread it to my team, so we'd take on all this knowledge, kind of like what we do on the show here, taking all the facts, data, and details. Then we go on site. We talk to the case agent themselves and any other experts they want to bring in to tell us about the individual we're going to be interacting with or creating a strategy around. And then the most important thing happens. We kick the case agent out of the room while we deliberate. Because when we deliberate, we're going to say things like, I think.
But you don't want to say that in front of the person who's actually receiving the information because they'll lock on to something that may or may not be true. And when that happens, they'll go down rabbit holes that go nowhere. They'll get sidetracked over here. They'll see something shiny over here. When you present to the consumer of your information, you have to be succinct, you have to be precise, you have to be accurate, and you have to be truthful. And so when you come out and give statements like, I think, you created more chaos in the world. So not less.

**Tony Brueski** (3:49)
I mean, it's really par for the course with this. I'm not shocked by this statement. It certainly makes a headline.
What just gets me about it is the seeming aloofness to it that saying these words out loud are going to have an effect. He said from the get-go, I'm not used to people taking my words seriously or something of that nature. Well, maybe six months into this shit show, you should be. Maybe at this point, there's cause and effect to the things that come out of that hole in your head and the way that people react to them.
And when you're talking about this, I mean, this is real life. This is a woman who is missing, who's probably dead, who has a family, who is grieving, who's being accused of being involved. They're going through their own hell. And you're just kind of like, well, I think. How about you just shut the F up if you got nothing to say? I mean, that might be the best route. I don't know. Call me crazy.