Nancy Guthrie: The Person at Her Door May Not Even Know Who Hired Them

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:17)
Let's go to another area of this. The theory with the most former law enforcement voices behind it, it says the man on Nancy Guthrie's porch or the person who sent him had access to her life before any of this happened. Nancy was 84, lived alone, kept a routine and had a circle of people moving through her world on a schedule. Caregivers, service workers, contractors, delivery routes, investigators have publicly cleared her family. But the family is not the orbit. 16 days before Nancy vanished, an 83-year-old named Gail Crane was taken from her Kentucky home by a caregiver who had been fired the day before, found a hundred miles away, bruised, bleeding with neck swelling. She couldn't explain. That's another area that people are talking about. And I'm not bringing it to the table to go see, this must be it. I'm bringing it to the table because people are talking about it. So let's parse it out. The blueprint is documented. The question is whether it maps to Tucson and whether one detail in Nancy's own porch kills the theory entirely. So let's let's parse it out for a moment. And it's easy because this is not the first one we've seen where, see, there was a kidnapping of someone or someone taken against their will or an old person disappeared within a hundred mile radius of Nancy Guthrie. Wow, this must be connected. Do you know how many people are within a hundred miles of where Nancy Guthrie disappeared?
It's the size of several countries.
There's a lot of people there. And when you have a lot of people, things like this happen. But obviously, you look for signs, you look for smoke. And a lot of times, it's not even enough smoke coming off of a lighter. So when an 84 year old vanishes from her own home, the first suspect list is in strangers. It's everyone with a key, a schedule, a reason to be on that property. Let's walk through that. Take me through how the list gets built in the first 48 hours and how fast it grows for investigators. Start cutting down who we don't need to be looking at when something like this takes place.

**Robin Dreeke** (2:30)
Well, typically you're gonna start as close as you possibly can. Law of Averages research says that if there's gonna be any harm against anyone, it's typically the family. You start looking there first because, and then you start looking at relationships, you look at behaviors in order to clear family, you're looking at alibis, you're looking at timelines, you're looking at means and methods and intent, and that's how family members then get cleared. And then you start looking at, then we call the concentric circles of access. And when it comes to a case like this, where there's looks to be from the porch guy, a recon, it looks to be familiarity, but not over familiarity. In other words, just the small data points we're getting, to me, from the very, very get go, I've definitely been on board with this was premeditated, but not necessarily premeditated by someone who actually was the caregiver, or was the gardener, or was the pool boy, but someone who talked to the pool boy, the gardener, the caregiver. I think this is potentially one degree of separation from Annie and Annie's family, but someone who's a close relative or associate with someone who had that direct knowledge, because there was enough familiarity to want to target Nancy, but not enough to actually say there's value here, because I think that's why this thing looks so mysterious to so many people, is because no one can conclusively say what exactly, something was targeted in this home, that I think everyone can agree upon.
It comes down to was Nancy herself targeted, or something be stolen from that house targeted. I know you have a lot of people around the Nancy was targeted for a distribution or for ransom or whatever it is, which when you start boiling it down, it falls out of the averages, how it was done, the number of people involved, the behaviors involved, the time of day, the way the ransom, supposed ransom was given. It's just never done that way. And then you do on more on the 60% side was, if you just look at a lot of averages, targeted for a very specific robbery inside the house, cash, medications, or jewelry. And nothing was taken in the house. But it looks like 42 minutes from some beginning to ending of this event, which is documented, something, someone was looking for something, but there was nothing of value. How come there's nothing of value? So in other words, both, you go down both sides and both completely fall apart with, there's nothing to be gained. There's literally nothing to be gained because both sides are completely dumb. And so that just brings us down to the simple fact of, think about this. When have we ever covered a case where the person doing the wrong was smart?