When former FBI agent Katherine Schweit heard about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, her mind drifted to a crime that took place in rural Wisconsin more than two decades ago.
An 88-year-old grandmother was abducted from her home in February 2003 and placed in the trunk of her car. Her abductor drove her to his property and shackled her inside a trailer. Soon after, the woman’s grandson, who owned a construction company, started to receive messages demanding millions for her release.
“The kidnapper thought he could get a big ransom from the family,” said Schweit, who investigated the case and helped capture the suspect and rescue the woman five days after she was taken.
The Guthrie case doesn’t seem to be following that script, Schweit said. “If you were going to abduct somebody for cash, why wouldn’t you aggressively try to get the cash by communicating with the family right from the start, so you could get your money and return the victim?”
It’s one of the big questions baffling investigators, law enforcement experts and the millions of Americans following the high-profile case. Even the recent release of home security video showing a potential subject provides no additional information about the person’s possible motive or what happened to Guthrie.
Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s “TODAY” show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, vanished from her home outside Tucson, Arizona, after family members dropped her off on the night of Jan. 31.
Eleven days later, the identity of her abductor or abductors remains a mystery. But Tuesday, the FBI released images and videos from Guthrie’s home security camera showing a person in a ski mask and gloves and carrying what appears to be a handgun. The person walks up to her house, head down, and then tries to tamper with the camera.
Michael Alcazar, a retired New York Police Department detective who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he expects the new images and videos to produce a flood of tips that will help investigators identify the person.
“One hundred percent, somebody is going to recognize him,” Alcazar said.
Alcazar said he thinks it’s significant that the suspect approached the house with the head down, an apparent effort to keep the doorbell camera from recording the face. “That tells me he’s been there before,” said Alcazar, who added that he wouldn’t discount the possibility that it was a burglary gone wrong.
After the new images and videos were released, Savannah Guthrie posted on her Instagram page: “We believe she is still alive. Bring her home.”
Abductions involving adults are rare in the U.S., and rarer still are the kind that don’t involve family disputes, drug traffickers or gangs, experts say.
Chip Massey, a retired FBI hostage negotiator, said the unusual circumstances of the case — an abduction involving a famous American family — reminded him of the 1932 kidnapping of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son from his home in New Jersey.
“This is the stuff of movies,” he said.
In Guthrie’s case, a possible ransom note was sent to three news outlets, and the FBI said it referred to an Apple Watch, which she is believed to have worn. The note included two deadlines — one at 5 p.m. Feb. 5 and a second deadline Monday, according to Heith Janke, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Phoenix division. But he said the note didn’t establish a means for communication.
A second note was sent to local TV station KOLD, but it didn’t include a ransom demand, and it was different “in almost every way” from the first one, according to the station’s news director, Jessica Bobula.
Massey, the retired FBI hostage negotiator, said the lack of communication complicates law enforcement’s ability to identify whoever is responsible.
“If I can’t hear a voice, if they can’t hear mine, a lot of my training and background is now useless,” he said.
Written messages alone, Massey added, can provide important leads for investigators, but they also could be used to deceive law enforcement.
Authorities have revealed that Guthrie’s blood was found on her porch. She has mobility issues and requires daily medication, but her mind is sharp, according to local authorities.
Jim Cavanaugh, a retired agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who is now an NBC News law enforcement analyst, said he’s not convinced the ransom note is legitimate. He said anyone could know that Guthrie wore an Apple Watch — all you have to do is Google her.
“There’s a picture that pops right up where they’re on the set of the ‘TODAY’ show, and the mother has a very prominent Apple Watch on,” he said. “Anybody sitting in Kathmandu could hit Google and see those pictures and demand bitcoin.”
Cavanaugh noted that Tucson is close to the southern border, where Mexican drug cartels operate. In the mid-2000s, its neighboring big city, Phoenix, was labeled the “kidnapping capital of the U.S.A.,” and many of the crimes were linked to the cartels.
He sees no reason a cartel would target someone like Guthrie. He thinks it’s likelier that a homegrown criminal would seek to hold her for ransom but that the person didn’t expect the case to blow up so quickly into a national obsession.
“It got too big too fast,” Cavanaugh said. “They could have gotten scared by the scope of the response and then abandoned it. But then, why wouldn’t they release Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”
Cavanaugh said that’s not the only possibility investigators would consider. The abductors could have hit the wrong house and decided against returning her out of fear of going to prison. Or it could have nothing to do with money, he said, and the person responsible could be harboring some kind of grudge.
Schweit, the former FBI agent, said it wouldn’t be especially hard for someone to remove Guthrie from her home and drive away undetected given the location. She lives in a quiet community about 6 miles north of Tucson where homes are spread out across desert terrain.
“That’s what makes it challenging for law enforcement,” she said.
In the absence of eyewitness accounts and additional video revealing more about the suspect, Schweit said, investigators seeking clues are forced to scrutinize the recordings from cameras that could be miles away.
They must canvass an almost endless number of locations and neighborhoods seeking information from people who might have seen something suspicious. And the FBI’s behavioral experts based in Quantico, Virginia, will be reviewing large amounts of data in the hope of finding a kernel of information that could lead to a suspect, Schweit said.
“It’s not a straight line,” she said, “from somebody gets abducted, a ransom note goes out, the person who gets kidnapped is recovered. That only happens in the movies.”
The FBI, Schweit said, is “incredibly capable of carrying out very complex work.”
“She’s out there, and they will find her. We just want to find her in time.”
