Nancy Guthrie ransom notes contain repeated writing quirks that could help identify suspect, expert says
A pair of messages that may have been sent by someone with knowledge of Nancy Guthrie's suspected kidnapping from her Arizona home contain a series of clues about their author, according to retired Colorado investigator Lisa Miller, who said grammatical habits and sentence patterns suggest both notes were likely written by the same person — and could ultimately trigger the tip detectives have been waiting for.
Guthrie is the 84-year-old mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie. Authorities have said she was taken from her home in northern Tucson in the early hours of Feb. 1, after a masked intruder appeared on her front steps in recovered doorbell camera video.
Making them public last month could do more than jog someone's memory, Miller said. It could also put pressure on whoever wrote the notes, potentially prompting a misstep that exposes the author to someone in their own circle.
"The bad guys can't help but look over their shoulder and wonder, are they onto me? Are they coming? And that pressure creates behavioral leakage that we're looking for and people around them might see."
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But the notes themselves may give the public something specific to look for.
"Think about if you've heard someone in your group, maybe outside your orbit that you just encounter that uses this strange language, or if you're written a letter," Miller said. "If you see something in their writing or in an email where they're using these comma splicings, those are the things that are useful to ask people to look for."
The comma splices — where two sentences are joined with a comma rather than separated by a period — are a signature detail in both notes, she added.
"We see it also again in the second note," she said. "So it's continuous between the two notes, which is one of the reasons why I believe this continuity more likely than not indicates this one author."
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The Pima County Sheriff's Department released the notes in July, six months after Guthrie's suspected abduction from her home in Tucson, Arizona. Her whereabouts remain unknown, and authorities said they are hoping that someone recognizes the sender's "unique linguistic style."
"These are characteristics, these are things that law enforcement can use to ask people, crowdsource for help in this case," Miller said.
And the comma splices aren't the only habits that caught her attention.
"We're seeing also some open compounds through the notes," she said. "We see 'heart related,' that should be hyphenated by most people when they write that. We see smartwatch written as two words. Most people write that as one. Floodlight, we see that written as words. So that is a continuity that we're seeing between the two."
She also said she doesn't think the sender used AI to concoct the messages. There's a typo, for example, and the sentences don't have a smooth, AI-generated flow, she said.
Instead, the unusual language may reflect the writer's unique speech and writing habits, Miller said.
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"There's something else, it's called idiolect," Miller explained. "Idiolect is our personal style of communication and it can be affected by many things. The region we grew up in, neighborhoods we live in, slang that we've adopted."
The sender's idiolect could be why they used the word "perished" rather than "died" and wrote that Guthrie had been "buried in nature," Miller speculated.
NANCY GUTHRIE RANSOM NOTE CLAIMED THAT SHE HAD DIED, BEEN ‘BURIED WITH NATURE,’ SOURCE SAYS
"Perhaps this idiolect, this personalized language is something that they've said based on religious upbringing, based on books they've read, maybe 'buried in nature' is something they utilize," she said.
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Another possibility, she said, is that offenders typically try to minimize their wrongdoing.
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"They blame others," Miller said. "They blame, you know, the victim themselves. They distance themselves from that bad thing that they did."
Miller also flagged the sender's use of both a dollar sign and "USD" to specify the ransom amount, along with the way dates and times were written, as other notable quirks.
"I would bring people from the public that are looking at these notes to look at that also, cause that's a distinction," she said.
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Authorities have not yet confirmed that the notes are authentic, but Guthrie's daughter, "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie, has said she believes they may be — and investigators haven't ruled them out either.
The sum of all rewards in the case is over $1.2 million.
Anyone with information is asked to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI or, to remain anonymous, call 520-88-CRIME.