Nancy Guthrie: The Second Note Wasn't A Ransom Demand

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Nancy Guthrie, 84 years old. In the dark hours of February 1st, somebody got into her Tucson home, left blood on her porch and took her. And there's still no body, no arrest, not even a name. But a note went out to local TV stations claiming she was dead, buried and with nature.
So here's the puzzle. How does anyone charge a murder with no victim, no suspect and the only confession sitting in a TV stations mail room?
This part takes the prosecution's side. Whether that one untraceable note is enough to carry the case. We're going to talk about what prosecutors might be looking at right now with no body and no suspect, but still starting to put building blocks in the case to go after somebody joining us to do just that. Eric Faddis, Defense Attorney and Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. Eric, you were once a prosecutor, so let's put on that cap for a moment. No body. She's been declared legally dead, but nobody's found her. She has not been declared legally dead. If you're the prosecutor, where do you even start building a murder case when you can't put the victim in front of the jury? And is that wall is cold as everybody thinks? What's going on right now in terms of considering how they're going to go after whoever they find?

**Eric Faddis** (1:38)
Gosh, you know, Tony, in theory, a prosecution does not require the victim's body. That's not an element per se that has to be met. But I can't think of a case in recent memory where the prosecution has gone forward on a homicide charge, didn't have the body, and still got a conviction. Just cannot fathom it.
It's just too difficult to rule out other potential explanations, to rule out an accident, to rule out that she did this to herself. Of course, there's no significant indication of that. But just these are things you have to rule out when you go to trial. And you cannot, in practical sense, rule those things out without the body. So I'm sure they're frantically searching the desert to try to find something. But yeah, that'd be a tall order for sure.

**Robin Dreeke** (2:29)
You know, with all that's going on and the heavy caseload that prosecutors have, law enforcement has, and we've talked about this numerous times before. You know, we have the stack that's this high and you have the bandwidth to do about this much. In reality, how much do you think the prosecution or prosecutors involved right now with this case, actively engaging agents on the grounds, directing them on what they're looking for?
So I'm going to do two parts in there. How actively do you think they're actually engaging with law enforcement and actually how much direction do you think they're giving law enforcement?

**Eric Faddis** (3:02)
You know, I certainly think that there is a concerted effort among prosecutors and law enforcement entities to try to reach some kind of resolution, some kind of closure of this case. But how much is going on right now? I mean, it's sad to say this case has has gone cold, you know, and, you know, what I would imagine is that they are trying to search for the body, which they've been doing since the very beginning, of course.
And we're talking about a broad landscape, you know, unforgiving terrain, you know, infinite possibilities where this body could be found. So certainly drones, cadaver dogs, there are tools at law enforcement's disposal. But for them to be successful with those tools hasn't happened yet. And it's looking rather grim.

**Tony Brueski** (3:47)
If you're the prosecutor in this case and you're watching where we're at with everything and what's been playing out over the last five months, how horrified are you? How? Not just at obviously this is a sad, horrible case, but horrified at the investigative work, horrified at Nanos and everything he said, horrified possibly at some of the steps of the FBI or not steps of the FBI. I mean, there's a lot of holes in this that are already gaping, it seems, at least from those of us who've been analyzing it.
And certainly, some of them sound pretty big as we talk about them on shows, but are they in reality when it comes to prosecuting a case? If you're sitting there and you're watching this, are you thinking, oh God, even if we do get the person, is this going to be a get out of jail free card for them because of all the missteps or is it too soon to really go down that road?