Nancy Guthrie: The Ransom Note Asked for $70K — The Reward Is $1.2 Million

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Welcome back to the fifth part in our series of debunking the Nancy Guthrie conspiracy theories. There's so many out there, and it's easy to fall down a trap of them. And it's not to say that all of them are completely wrong. Usually in any conspiracy theory, there's an element of truth, or there's elements, there's pieces here and there, scaffolding, if you will, that help make these theories believable. And that's what helps them get traction and continue to move forward. So if you've fallen down some of these rabbit holes, don't feel bad. We're here to discuss, to go, oh, okay, with more information, you can make better decisions. And you can think of things more clearly when you have more information. And if you still suck on one of these, if you're still saying, but wait, what about this? Then tell me in the comment section. I'll have a conversation about it. I'm not here to say you're stupid. I don't need you to hear to say I'm stupid. We're here to have a dialogue and communicate. That's the point of this, not to win the game of who can debunk the other fastest. So we're going to go into to this one today, the ransom notes and a theory that a lot of people are holding on to, that the ransom notes prove that she's still alive.
Because that is alive and well in some areas of the Internet. And I get it, to a certain extent.
It's a facet of hope, it's a lever of hope.
And an empathetic person wants to pull that lever of hope, even if the evidence points otherwise. Every other theory in this series has been relatively easy to debunk. The cartel jet was built on a coincidence and collapsed under the weight of real evidence. The healthcare fraud video fabricated a person's identity. The family conspiracy destroyed innocent people's lives and was killed by a definitive clearance. The protective custody theory required the entire federal government to be running a fake homicide investigation for an 80-some-year-old woman for some reason of a morning show host. Because, yes, that's what they do.
Each of those theories was built by people turning a tragedy into content, or by people, as we just discussed, holding out hope even in areas that don't make a lot of sense. This one is a little different. The people who believe the ransom notes are real, who believe Nancy Guthrie is alive somewhere being held, and that the right negotiation could still bring her home, aren't necessarily building content. A lot of them are people who care about this family, who followed this case from the beginning, who light candles and post prayers, and have not been able to let go of hope that this story doesn't end the way the evidence says it ends. That's not a character flaw. That's grief by proxy. That's the human inability to stop hoping when hope is the only thing left. That makes this the hardest episode in the series, because what we're really doing is asking people to sit with facts they don't want to look at. One of these ransom note senders is already facing federal charges, and when you hear how lazy, how careless, how transparently opportunistic it was, it changes how you hear every ransom note that came after, at least what we know about some of them, although there is a new ransom note in the fold that we'll touch on here in a moment. One that doesn't really ask for anything but apparently gives an apology. There's another sender who told TMZ two things about Nancy in back to back messages, and they both can't be true. Let me walk you through what actually happened with the ransom notes as we understand them at this point in time, because the timeline matters. The days after Nancy disappeared, multiple ransom demand surfaced. The first went to media outlets, TMZ, local news organizations, not directly to the family. The notes demanded millions in Bitcoin for Nancy's safe return. Some of them included details about the case that appeared specific enough to concern investigators initially. And in the vacuum of those early days, the notes felt like a lead. They felt like someone on the other end knew something. Savannah Guthrie acknowledged the notes publicly. She told the Today Show that she believed most of them were fake, but that two notes the family had received and responded to, she tended to believe those are real. The family offered to pay. They said so publicly. They begged for proof of life. Proof that their mother was alive and that paying the ransom would bring her back. No proof of life was ever provided. Every deadline passed, communication stopped, then restarted sporadically with shifting claims and new bitcoin wallet addresses. The family never received what they asked for. The one thing they needed evidence that Nancy was still alive, that never came.