Nancy Guthrie Investigation: The Internet Outage, the Escalation Decision, and What the FBI Is Really Doing

0:00This is Hidden Tillers Live with Tony Brusky and Robin Dree. Surprise, there's not a whole lot that's happened over the weekend and the Nancy got three case, but you guys have a lot of questions about it and we have a lot of answers because we're Radio Shack. We bought the rights to them and we're now actually running a Radio Shack along with doing true crime now. There are a lot of questions and a lot of things that we talk about on the show that I go through our question section sometimes and go, yeah, it's a good one. We should discuss that. So we're going to try and do that today. We're going to try and get through a bunch of questions that you guys have written in. I grabbed a bunch of them. Me and Robin are going to discuss them. Robin Drake with us as always, retired FBI Special Agent, former Chief of the Counter Intelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. And be sure to give us your questions as well as we do this live today as well. We'll try and hit some of those. But this is what we're going to do. We're going to do some Nancy got three.

1:01We're going to talk about Cory Richens a little bit as well, but we're going to start with Nancy and dive into this because there's a lot of interesting new little nuggets that have been getting coming out. One of them involving the internet and they want to want to get to this one right away. I'm curious. There's no Robin. You saw this over the week and I'm curious what you found on this. This is the first question we got says, hey guys, I keep hearing that the internet in Nancy's neighborhood went out the night she disappeared. Nobody's really talking about that. Is that a coincidence? Or did somebody cut it on purpose? And if they did, what does it tell us about what we're dealing with? So it, I mean, it starts with this allegations. I believe in neighbors said they thought their internet went out and then it slowly or rather quickly spirals into, oh my gosh, conspiracy. The neighborhood, the internet went out, somebody like it can go pretty far, pretty quick. What, what have you kind of come to on this question? First of all, I love taking questions, you know, telling me when you sent me these last

2:03nights, I was like, woohoo, let's dive in. It's so much fun kind of strategizing going through things and looking at laws of probability then you look at the human behavior side of things and especially when it comes to conspiracy theory kind of things. It's one of my favorite things to do is kind of, I don't like saying debunk because that kind of demeans the person that came up with it. It's just kind of like, let's play it out and see if this logically makes sense and could actually happen. And so when it came to the internet thing, it literally started like you just said, it started with, hey, one of the neighbors when they're recamficing the neighborhood said, hey, I think my Wi-Fi might have gotten a little sketchier something on that night. It then spirals out of control with, and why does this happen? Because people are still looking and grasping for explanations to what can't be explained yet. And so they just grab space, it gets clickbaited on a lot of streaming platforms, and then it spirals out of control too. The neighborhood lost internet that night, no, it didn't. So what we do is we go and we look at facts, data, and details to actually see what the

3:07original statement was and see if there's a ground truth to it. And then I research what's the likelihood is there technology that could actually wipe out the Wi-Fi in the entire neighborhood, not unless you're fine in an F-35 like my son and was invading Venezuela and flips a switch. So no. That seems likely. Right. You never know. Right. But what can happen? So there are personal jammers. And I look this up. There are personal jammers you can buy and you can wear it on your body. And the range is very, very limited. And in fact, when I was doing certain things in the FBI, we actually had this kind of stuff too. And it is very limited range because it takes the power source. And could have been possibly put in that big bulky backpack potentially. So it takes a little more premeditation, takes some money, takes some effort. But at the same time, why not just whack that thing off the front and you're already covered anyway. So it's not getting a lot of traction, I think, to a regional question that they sent in just because there's nothing there, really. And it literally just one person for what I understand during a neighborhood canvas came

4:09up with this. And how many times that happened anyway? Yeah. So that's sketchy kind of stuff. So that one kind of, no, there's not much there. And this is just, it's a prime example to me. When we don't have information, people are going to try and fill in the blanks. There has been, there was a document in report that there was a, I'm saying this as accurately as I can, a utility box. Now we don't know what type of utility we don't know what the utility holds or what it holds or why it holds or how long it's been there. But there was reports close to her home of a damaged utility box. Now this doesn't mean it happened because of whoever did this. It could have been damaged one thousand different ways they don't really know. And again, we don't know what utility it is. Might not even be internet. But someone has seen this. And so they're looking at it a little bit. Could this have something to do with the reports of the internet going out in the neighborhood at that point in time? Maybe. But again, it's a lot of maybe. It's a lot of, well, this looks weird. Could that have maybe, maybe? And there's so many elements to this idea being connected with maybe.

5:13And by the time you go from this element and connect it with a maybe and then connect that element with another maybe and that one with another maybe, it's a lot of maybe's that really, you know, it sounds good. Maybe it gets you somewhere, but we don't really know. At the end of the day for me on this one was, do you really think they were that advanced with a Wi-Fi jammer when they were grabbing foliage from the front yard and putting petunias over the camera? They had some sort of a Wi-Fi jammer or prepared for that. They were not able to do that basic part. Why would they be that much more advanced over here? I mean, is that an insane, you know, theory to be operating on or just the mindset of these people? They're not that advanced because of this. Or could they be? And they just really were stupid on a very obvious thing. Well, just think about the behaviors that we saw in the video. If you're using a Wi-Fi jammer and you have what looks like the reps this person has because

6:16there's a lot of fluid movement in here on that night, if you don't have faith in your Wi-Fi jammer, why don't you even have it? Because if you're, in other words, if you have a Wi-Fi jammer and you have faith in the equipment you have, why you take in a branch and put it over the, the wrink head. So those two things are really incongruent. The behaviors are incongruent with the conclusion that people are coming up with that they were using Wi-Fi jammers. I've never seen it happen on these things. I mean, they are using it from time to time. I looked it up. And so they are showing up from time to time. I think that's why that theory is posted out there. But that's why they probably also put it on a list of questions that they're using to re-campus the neighborhood to just kind of assess what people are seeing or not seeing. And again, I mean, I get blips in my stuff all the time. Hell, last night when I frigging main TV in my house or some reason wasn't, wasn't downloading right? I'm running speed tests on my Wi-Fi in the house all the time, like, why isn't this working why isn't this working? And did it have anything to do with a Wi-Fi jammer in the neighborhood? No. Crapie equipment sometimes, really.

7:16Yeah, sometimes it's just that. Let's talk about this other one. And again, a lot of these questions are going to be coming in from a perspective. And you can tell what the perspective is. Or what one has accepted as part of the true story based on their questions. So this one here says, this is something that's been driving me crazy. At what exact moment did this go from a burglary to a kidnapping? Like what is happening in someone's head that they make that decision? Because that's the decision that changes everything. So this is something where someone is thinking of it from a burglary standpoint. And maybe not necessarily thinking that it was going to originally be a kidnapping. I'm not sure. But let's talk about that. Let's talk about that premise of if this was a burglary and somehow, hey, guess what everybody, we're going to add kidnapping to the list today of what we're going to do. Was that what took place? How do you go from burglary to kidnapping?

8:18What's your thoughts Robin? Yeah. Even when talking to Jennifer Coffin Defer on Friday on this one, I am still, so let's back up. There's two main schools of camp on this of what the motive here was or the intent. You have some of the people are saying this was a retribution, home invasion against Nancy and or Savannah for confrontation with with possibly an abduction as part of it or not part of it. And so that's one school of thought. And then the other school of thought where I'm leaning more towards still even after and I'll go through the research and what I've done today on it even more diving so deep on this one, which for me was home invasion for and it's so both schools of camp I'm on and that everyone's agreeing was this was targeted. This was an intentional. This wasn't random that they just randomly showed up in Nancy's house and said we're going to do something here.

9:19Everyone is pretty congruent on this was targeted against Nancy and her house. It's the intent of what they had inside that house is where there's two different kind of mindsets and one is that it was for Nancy herself and the other was for what Nancy has. That's a good way to put it. What she has or her and way this flushes out. So if you go on the intent for retribution against Nancy because like Jennifer and like Paul Moro on Fox and a few other folks are saying it was for retribution and even Paul Moro on Fox who I greatly respect. He's got a lot of years of it as a detective. I follow his stuff as some ideas for for me as well. His thing is about that he was holding a secret that she wasn't sharing that she would there was a grudge against her for someone. I played that one out behaviorally and even the grudge against Nancy, the likelihood, I mean, think about this, the likelihood that an 84 year old woman with a close family,

10:23with close friends, a church group has a personal grudge against her that she hasn't shared with someone is so exceptionally low. It's like why wouldn't she share that information because what happens is that information would have been shared. They would have investigated that. They would have followed up on those leads and that person would be arrested right now if it was at that level. So that's why I kind of keep flushing that out even though the laws of probability of the home invasion and panic escalation are extremely low probability while the other behaviors don't fit as well. And also on the abduction side for targeted against Nancy, the research on this is also very solid. For a targeted home invasion for removal of a human being for whatever reason is three to 12 minutes inside the house, it's three to 12 minutes and this was 41. Yeah. So something else was happening in that house and then my side of it, again, I'm 60, 40 on this. It's not like Robins definitely on this. No, I'm always open to new data, new things that are coming out is that it was going

11:25in the house looking for something specific in 41 minutes couldn't find it. She wakes up, confronts the individual and something goes sideways with her health and she winds up having to be removed because the panic escalation is remove the evidence. And so that's where both sides kind of do come together on one targeted to got to remove the evidence of her because something went sideways with her life, her well-being or something and no one wants to leave any evidence behind of whether she saw the person. She recognized the person. There's lots of theories on that and I'm open to all of those. But I'm still thinking it was 41 minutes looking for something couldn't find and something went sideways and dancing and they removed their body for evidence. And so looking for something so like thinking that they maybe went in there just throwing a random object out there and I'm not saying this is a ring, whatever, like maybe someone saw this, she had a ring or something of value, they're looking for it.

12:27They can't find it. Something happened with her, she's out or I guess the, I mean, what runs through my mind on this scenario is it was supposed to be a robbery, get in, get out, not taking hurt, hopefully not hurt, not even waking up, really is kind of my thought process. And something happened, she did wake up, she was seen or she saw them, she caught them, she was disabled in some way, shape or form, whether it be accidental or intentional. And then I'm thinking that might have happened early on and then sitting there 47 minutes, I'm wondering if any phone calls were made, I'm wondering if anybody was like, what do I do now? What should we do? Should I take her? Or they just sat there for 47 minutes trying to contemplate what we're going to do here and the solution into the being we're going to take her with us? I don't know. That's interesting. You say if it was targeted for a kidnapping that it took that long because it doesn't point in the direction of it being a targeted kidnapping then for taking as long as it did. I don't think it was, and everyone's pretty concur on this, this wasn't, no one that

13:29I followed things that was an intentional kidnapping for ransom, it was actually either targeted for her for some sort of retribution or confrontation or my side of, they're looking for something and the viewer just put on there too for painkillers. That's a reasonable thing because I always say looking for something that wasn't found in 41 minutes, something was going on in 41 minutes. And when you, and you need to confront someone in 41 minutes, again, it's so strange, that's why everyone's kind of, we're circling around, on both sides on this one, anything both sides are pretty open to what could happen or maybe, but I think everyone does agree, removed because of evidence, they've removed her body for evidence. I want to throw this one at you, this one kind of came to me. I have some, because I dream about this shit every day, like, you know, I'm literally, I'm in here at seven a.m. recording and then I'm, I'm usually in here till sometimes

14:32late at night, tonight I'm on court TV, so sometimes it's eight, nine at night, I'm still in here doing stuff. And so I go to bed and it's like, it's all I can think about. So I had one the other night and I woke up to this and, and it's very simple and I, I want to get your thoughts. What if Nancy witness something or someone in some place that they shouldn't have been? And it could be very detrimental to that person or what, to somebody, for whatever reason that may be, she may have no idea that she saw anything that was questionable or that shouldn't have been seen. But if whoever was seen knew what, look, if if I get caught for this, they can go back to her and she can point, and point a finger, it would not even know that she witnessed something that shouldn't have been seen or someone in a place they shouldn't have been. What could it have been something like that where she was, who knows? I mean, I'm just throwing randomness out here at the grocery store, at something, I don't

15:34know, someplace where she witnessed someone that shouldn't have been seen. She did see them. She's completely oblivious that this was anything of note, but they weren't. And they were like, she's got to go. Sure. Then why 41 minutes? Exactly. Why in that? And that? No. That answers that question because I was running that through my mind all week and going, oh, maybe. And then Robin's like, 40 women. Like, okay. That's why that's why this is so tough down. But the same thing though, and you can do the same thing on my theory of taking someone from the house. Well, then, you know, because the research will say, grabbing goes or grabbing goes, you're looking for something, you grab it and you get out. No. Unless you're, and then I did, you know, just to show what freakish Robin does, staying up nights too, doing this type of thing. I actually did a research of, has Nancy ever been photographed in anything of jewelry that actually had value? Yeah. No. Not that I found. So again, it would have to be something that someone had an inside knowledge of, which,

16:37again, a lot of people are saying this was an inside knowledge kind of thing, not because it was a close proximity, necessarily, like a close relationship, but close enough to know what's in the house. I'm still thinking one degree of separation from someone that had closer access, that would have leakage through something, through dialogue discussion, a worker, a delivery person, someone, somewhere, and then also, I mean, there, there wasn't any other invasions of houses for burglaries within a hundred miles or a house, either, that actually matched this pattern. Yeah. I mean, I looked up that. So I, it's why all these, these things, all of them are pretty improbable. It's just a really improbable case. That's why we're kind of left is, what do we have left? It is. It is an improbable case. Do you think it's going to make any more sense once they do find, whoever, if they find whoever did this, if it's going to go, oh, well, what's not so improbable after all? I think so. Or if it's going to be, yeah, this is just truly an outlier. The whole damn thing is an outlier. I still think we're going to be under impressed when they do get this guy, and Jennifer said

17:41it on Friday, she's still 100% convinced they're going to get this individual soon-ish. And I lean towards that when you look at how long it takes to solve these cases and find someone like this, we're still within that window of dead, it's going to happen. It's not anywhere near to being four-learned or dead, just because they're still going through a lot of leads. I know it's another question we'll be covering, but there's a lot. There's still going through. There's still DNA that they're processing. They're going to put in databases, although that's challenging just because of someone somewhere from some family tree somewhere also has to be in a family tree database, 23 of me or something like that, because it obviously wasn't encodus. It takes some time to, I guess, separate, I'm not a total DNA expert, just because I'm covering these cases, but they do have to separate Nancy's from the other DNA they found in the house. At least they did determine it wasn't tied to anyone that was close to Nancy, so we look like we definitely have the DNA of an unsub, we just have to figure out if this was an unsub that can explain away their presence in the house or not.

18:41Also what kind of DNA came from that also comes into play, was it saliva, was it another bodily fluid, was it blood, so yeah, a lot of babies in there still. Another question, this one was directed to you, it says, Robin, I need you to help me understand this person went home after this, I mean we're assuming they did, they've been going to sleep, waking up, maybe going to work, talking to people for over a month now. How is that even possible psychologically? At what point does that just break a person? What are your thoughts on that? How this is affecting the individual, porch guy directly, if assuming that they are out functioning, doing an everyday life? Yeah, this is a great question, because a lot of our theories are that someone's going to crack at some point, people are going to recognize red flags and turn them in, that's why Savannah is doing a beautiful job with a messaging that she and her family have been putting out, playing to that empathetic side because empathy does crack, empathy does leak

19:43when you have it. If someone doesn't have as much empathy, it doesn't leak. Also, part of that also is compartmentalization, this individual could very easily compartmentalize their lives and kind of take what their actions here did and put them aside and never think about it again. I thought about another way to look at this, though, too, and that is, one, again, when you look at the front door footage, this person had what some of us are assuming had some reps that having done some home invasions before for whatever purpose, because it was just part of her natural behavior it looked like, and so if they, if a typical home invasion for them was part of their natural behavior, there's not going to be any leakage. So, let's just remove that aspect of it, but now we have the missing, Nancy part of it, and saying for argument's sake, she's, she's passed and she's gone. If this individual doesn't blame themselves so that action, in other words, if she died because of having a heart attack, she died of shock, she died inside that house or else words. In other words, this individual could very easily rationalize a way, she didn't die because

20:46of me. Then there's no guilt on this person's necessarily, in other words, if they rationalize the way how she passed, if that's what happened, there's not going to be as much leak itch because they don't see it as their fault. It just was a byproduct of them doing what they do all the time anyway, and if they don't have any other contacts outside that immediate, close circle of family and friends, then there won't be any leakage anyway, and it's, it's just going to be business as normal. Or they could just explain away that, hey, I got a typical stress every day because I've tried to provide for my family and I'm not making any money, so I'm robbing houses. So, there's a lot of reasons why there wouldn't be leakage. Although, it's a shame because normal healthy human beings, we would have leakage, hell, we'd have leakage within first five seconds, hell, you can't, you know, typical people can't even lie well because it feels so uncomfortable to deceive someone about something intentionally. Yeah, I mean, that really makes a lot of sense the way you put it that way, where if this was, in fact, something where they didn't take a frying pan to Nancy and she had a heart

21:48attack, whatever, slipped something, something where they didn't, their hand wasn't at fault for the actual injury. Other than getting into her house of the middle of the night and somehow startling her and something horrible happened, but directly, they're able to kind of tell themselves a slightly different tale to not make it so damning. People are very good at that, especially if you're already doing this, if you already have told yourself a story that you're out there robbing the rich woman's house down the road because you need, and she has, and people have those ways of doing mental gymnastics, you already get understand, they got that framework going on, it's not hard to adapt that framework to other scenarios in their life. That's important. This is an interesting one, and we've been talking about this, I think, probably longer than most have, this is, there has to be someone in this guy's life who suspects something, a girlfriend, a buddy, someone at work.

22:52What is keeping that person from picking up the phone right now, and what's it going to take to get them to make that call? Do you think there's Ben Lee Kitch, I guess, is my question. Now, there's the thought, well, was there more than one person involved? We don't have any evidence for that. So if there is just someone else in this person's life, has there been Lee Kitch, I mean, or are they just really keeping this tight to the vast? That's the million dollar question. It's hard to imagine many scenarios where someone closest individual isn't aware that something went sideways during the same time period, and if they're watching the news at all anywhere, at least during that time period, because right now they could probably watch the news and not pick up on this at all, that they wouldn't have been aware of something. So then we have to look at the motivations of human beings taking action, not taking action. Well, there's one real main possibility is that for some reason, as of right now, whoever does know if anyone else knows other than it's one individual, or some of the theories

23:56are there there's more than one, but we'll say one for the sake of arguments, that it's not in their best interest according to their mindset to share this information with anyone. They're not motivated to do it because it's either by fear, it's usually fear is the greatest motivator for action or inaction, and so there's a fear of the individual. And if it's a fear of the individual, they would typically find a way to leak to someone else what's going on because they have fear, and people that typically have fear can't be controlled very long, unless they're in hand-cuffed down, but the fear could also be of their own self-discovery. So part of what I think as a maybe on this is that you have a small, very small group of people that may be involved in this, like a family group or a very close associate, like cousin group or something, that you might have family members that are not total legal U.S. citizens or persons, and if there's a fear of leakage someplace, the entire group

24:57might be exported, or who knows, you know, the current administration is literally ramping up on that kind of stuff, and especially when Trump says I'm going to kill anyone that is associated with this. So I think fear is playing into motivations for not sharing, because it's hard to imagine there's not at least one other individual that's not getting red flags on something. And so the loyalty to the individual is much greater than the possibility of getting a million dollars from Nancy, I mean from Savannah, or 200,000 plus from the government. So that's why tips from the public are generally going to be our greatest indicators on these things, because so far there's no cracks in the immediate circle of this individual, but as time goes on, what happens is, and this I think goes to another question comes up, so I might be jumping ahead, as time goes on, it's actually to our benefit on the law enforcement side if they're not discovered, because what happens is you get more brazen,

26:00you get more confident, you think this thing is passing, so you start malving off, you start having leakage, and your close associates do, and they start putting two to two together. So this person for the rest of their lives will never be safe, because cold cases don't stay cold if a new tip comes along, even if this does eventually go cold. It will be very fascinating to see if this person who did this has will leak anything. I wonder if the person who did this is even still alive, quite honestly, because I think that also, you know, that could also answer the question, why has it there been linkage? Maybe they're not around anymore, I don't know, but why would they be gone? I guess it'd be the next question. Murder suicides are, especially if it's so here, so now we'll go down the law probability back to the grievance issue again, so grievances and you're dealing with people that are going to do harm to another individual because of a grievance. Murder suicides are pretty common, but I didn't look it up before it came to shows.

27:05I didn't entertain it so you brought it up. You know, us finding these murder suicides, well, just look at the Brown University incident where you had the mass shooter at Brown University a couple months ago, and they found the individual did the murders, actually killed himself inside a storage unit. You know, so murder suicides and grievance kind of things are kind of common. So if it was that, but again, how is that get the bunked? If someone had a grievance against Nancy, why wouldn't someone else know that we've already investigated it? Yeah, exactly. I mean, the only, I mean, it gets another weird 10th roll to go down, but I mean, it's one due examine because when we don't have information, we're going to look at everything that's out there. So many questions, we'd love to get your questions if you got more and give it to your thoughts on these ones in the comments section on our sub-stacking and our YouTube. The links are in the description and be sure to press subscribe wherever you're getting podcasts so you don't miss any of it. Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Brusky

28:08and the Hidden Killers podcast.