Nancy Guthrie's Kidnapper Left the Money and Did WHAT?

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Let's move over to Ransom Letter No.
Four days later, a second note landed in the same Tucson newsroom about Nancy Guthrie. The final deadline hadn't passed. Six million dollars was on the table. And whoever wrote this walked away from every dollar of it. Here's the second note in full, exactly as the Sheriff's Department released it. It says, Guthrie family, we did not fully grasp the seriousness of her physical condition. We never intended to hurt her. That was not our intention. She perished shortly after she was taken. We believe it was heart related. She is buried in nature now. Nothing you could have done could have changed the outcome. We want your family to know this and hope you all can find peace. We are truly sorry.
It reads nothing like the first very mechanical, very institution based letter. It's almost like someone else wrote this. The only reason it's connected is because it apparently came from the same IP address that the first one came from. So the odds of that happening are slim to nil. They came from the same place, written by the same person. I guess that's the question.
What's your take on letter number two, Shavaun?

**Shavaun Scott** (1:24)
It really fascinated me because it's almost got a literary quality to it. And the use of two words jumped out at me because they're not words that I think in normal conversation we would use. She perished. She perished.
Most people would say she died. If you want to soften that one a little bit, she passed away.
But the grasp and the perished, that made me think, this is somebody who's a reader, you know. They're the kind of words that a writer, somebody who's looking at a more creative use of language would use. So that jumped out at me. That was interesting.
The other thing that became, I think, predominant in this second one was the need to present themselves as a moral person. You know, I'm not a bad person. And then moving near the end with almost an attempt, she's in nature, you know. This is an attempt to soothe the family and comfort them. And that was rather extraordinary. So it surprised me.

**Tony Brueski** (2:39)
It's like families of bunnies hopping around her grave and there's daisies growing. It's like, what are we like? I'm like, I'm expecting that sort of music to be playing in the background. I mean, so they literally go from, we want four million. If we don't get it by then, it's going to be six. And if she's not, she's dead. And now we didn't really mean any of it. We didn't mean to hurt her. Like, oh, gosh, I got more questions. Robin, your take on letter two.

**Robin Drake** (3:07)
Yeah. So definitely in line with what Shavaun and many others said, too, the second letter is preempting just in case they're caught. They want to show that they didn't, she didn't die by their hands. They're doing the best they can to push the blame off on. They didn't know. They saw her in Mayacopa. And that happens quite frequently in cases where there is an accidental death. But at the hands of someone that really shouldn't have been there. But this is the real big letter to me that says that Ransom was not the primary objective because this also rings true to this is a panic escalation. That if they truly wanted the money, why not wait till the deadline to see if it's delivered? They didn't wait till that second deadline. When she passed away in their hands, the first thing they did was not go for the money. They went to say, oh, I got to make it so just in case I am caught, I can say I wasn't about the money. So again, the home invasion for the intent of getting something in value in the house was, to me, it was an object that they're going for.
When they couldn't get what they're going for because they had bad information, couldn't find whatever it was, and they encountered her panic escalation, take her, plan B.
Note Run rings as plan B.
We got to get at something out of this. Note Two says, I want nothing to do with this anymore because the entire thing fell apart. I got to distance myself, run away, hide and put a mea culpa out there and never speak of this again. That's what this says to me. That's why I still think that the whole ransom for extortion was plan B of what they wanted to do. That's how these read. That's if, again, we'll go back to the world of maybe and if, if this was written by the person that actually abducted her, or if it's secondhand information, someone who's having fun playing with law enforcement. Although I don't, I don't, I don't see that language in there, but you leave all possibilities open.