Robin Dreeke: The Nancy Guthrie Suspect Isn't Uniquely Sloppy — He's Normal

0:00Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with Chamba by my side. Race to ChambaCasino.com, let's Chamba. No purchase necessary, BTW Group, Void We're Prohibited by Ma. CTNC's 21 Plus, sponsored by ChambaCasino. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chamba. Jump in at ChambaCasino.com, let's Chamba. No purchase necessary, BTW Group, Void We're Prohibited by Ma. CTNC's 21 Plus, sponsored by ChambaCasino. No purchase necessary, BTW Group, Void We're Prohibited by Ma. This is Hidden Tillers Live with Tony Busky and Robin Drie. Hi, welcome back to the program. We got a lot going on today. Robin Drieek is here with us and Robin is going to be with us every day going forward. Yes, as our co-host. Robin welcome from graduating from being guest to co-host. And of course, your insight just, you know, completely,

1:04I'd say priceless on all these cases that we've been talking about for the last many years, really excited for you to be here in this capacity and to join in the conversations with all of our guests throughout the week as well. So for folks wondering, well, what about the other guests? There's still here, too, Robins, there's gonna be with us on those conversations as well. So, welcome. Thank you, Mike. You can see the smile on my face has been my goosebumps are going, you know, when you feel, you know, so funny, we talk about such unhealthy things all the time, but when you're part of a healthy group, you know, you're just excited. Yeah, it is a great, it is a great pleasure to be with you all. It's a healthy group, a healthy group talking about unhealthy things. Yes, it's easy talking about the young crazy. Exactly. We have spent now four weeks going on five, dissecting every visible detail in the Nancy Guthrie case on the suspect. And we're gonna talk about the Nancy Guthrie case in two different lanes here this morning.

2:05We're gonna talk about the suspect and we're gonna talk about the investigation and the myth of competency of each. Yes, I love that, yes. Of each, because we're looking at the suspect that's what we're gonna talk about first. The Walmart backpack, the awkward holster, the improvised camera cover or whatever that is there and the assumption underneath all of this is that this guy knew what he was doing from some and others saying, well, look how sloppy he is. He's grabbing foliage to cover the camera. Both, you can't really have one, you can't really have him both coexisting being competent and incompetent at the same time. I don't know, or maybe you can. Let's jump into all of this because this is something that I think a lot of people are trying to run through their mind with some sort of sensibility. And I think a lot of it comes down to we,

3:06do we sometimes expect things to be bigger and more grand and have a greater meaning than they actually are in real life? Yeah, as I texted you non-stop over the weekend as I typically do when I start doing my program prep, the interesting thing that happens to us, especially when we deal with cases that hit a national level which is the ones we typically cover, is that each of us, including us, we create a confirmation bias and we've talked about confirmation biases all the time and our confirmation biases are based upon things we've been exposed to throughout our lives, especially in a recency. And especially with cases like this, our confirmation biases typically come from two things. One, what we see and absorb from TV and things like criminal minds and all these great Hollywood and television productions that talk about the ideal, idealic world in which investigations take place

4:10which there never is that way. And also what our hopes and expectations are as set by people that talk about these things, like pundits like us and others. And so when an individual then starts consuming the reality of what is based on the confirmation bias they have and they mismatch, they think something's a miss and they start loving the poke holes at it. And especially when you don't have the 24 hour turnaround of resolution or the one hour resolution that we're used to seeing on TV, I know a lot of people have said this, but it still hits us that something must be a miss. And then what happens is people that love poking holes and what I love about what we do is we don't poke holes, we examine some of them poke a hole, let's go down the rabbit hole, some of them poke a hole, let's examine that. What happens is that when something doesn't go the way we wanted to go, we're going to start having a negative confirmation bias only looking for what someone's doing wrong, what's going wrong in the investigation. So we're always going to see things that are going wrong. And will we always find it?

5:11Yes, because it's human nature. No one is perfect, no investigation is perfect. But what happens is you start ignoring all the things that are going right. And so that's what I've done and continue to do is like I just always, for some reason, I have this ability to take this pragmatic objective of you, let's look at that, let's look at the research and let's do comparisons to all these things. And so on par, and as goes with both the investigation itself, as well as the culprit, what was normal? What wasn't normal? What stood out? What doesn't stood out? And to your point, when you started out in your opening, you can have both at the same time, I think. I think this guy that approached the door, he had reps, I remember the first time I saw that video image of him, so covered up, so well covered face. I mean, this thing about this, he was just, he was comparing contrast to coworker in him. That was coworker's first rep in trying to go and kill someone, and he was floppy. He did a lot of things right, based on what he thought

6:14was gonna happen, and then things went sideways when you had stress escalation, hit things didn't go the way he wanted, he leaves nicely, he's behind DNA and video footage of cars, all this thing, or rye, and also what he was wearing, it was striking to them. And then you look at this guy, he had reps of hiding identity, I think, because we haven't found much. There were still flaws in it, and when he hit things, he wasn't expected, that's when we started seeing it, hit a little chaos for him, like taking branches and putting over rain canton thing, or even, I think we'll go back to the door selection. I think his selection of going in that front door, not a side door, a side window, by the pool, that was a major boo-boo on his part, because there was no rain cams back there. Well, that to me, that's what strikes me about the whole damn thing is being off, is he went to the front door, he wasn't prepared for a doorbell camera. But yet he has reps in this.

7:16How can the two both be true? I guess that's, I mean, to me, I don't know, I'm not a criminal, I'm not hitting up houses, but even without doing that, the first thing, if someone said, Tony, today's physical challenge on double dares breaking into your neighbor's house, you're not gonna be arrested, just go get the flag in the upstairs, get on the hamster wheel, and then you get it and you run out and you get covered in slime. Something like that, if it was like a non-threatening, evil thing to do, but if I were to do that, and they were like, okay, you gotta kind of plan this out, the first thing I'd be thinking of, a doorbell, you don't wanna get caught, so you can't be identified. That's the first thing that would be on my mind. How is that not the first thing that's on this guy's mind that supposedly has some sort of reps here? So, here's a way to think about it, get thought experiment. So, and all the nonverbal experts out there saying it, he was fluid, he didn't stress anything,

8:17he looked completely natural of doing what he's doing at their front door because he didn't have halting behavior, but like you said, he was a little weird with that ring cam on the front. So, what would make something like that have, what would make behavior like that? If he was grabbing reps and breaking an entry of homes that didn't have ring cams, that stands to reason. What kind of homes don't have that? Is it a Nancy Guthrie kind of home or is it a lower income kind of home? See what I mean? So. Or the age of the resident type of home too. I guess that's something else to consider in this equation because, look, I do not know the demographics of the neighborhood, and it's kind of a blanket statement to say that like everybody down there is old or retired that's not true by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a higher population of that there. And if you're in a higher income neighborhood, bigger homes, older homes, statistically, you're probably going to have more older, wealthier residents

9:21that may also not be as technologically inclined. So, that may also then lead to maybe not as many ring doorbells that all of us in the demographic of 25 to 64 have. And you get above that, you go 65 plus, I would imagine your amount of people with ring doorbells dramatically drops. So maybe that's part of it too. I'm just kind of openly throwing that into the conjecture. So basically what we're looking at is, what looks like normal natural behavior that he has reps in and what doesn't. And obviously the way he took care of that ring cam was different than what he was expecting. Or, or he's just that stupid thinking that thing would work. Again, and I know people like to jump to, well, if he's that stupid, how come he hasn't been caught yet? Well, it doesn't mean, just because you haven't been caught doesn't mean you're smart. It just means that what you did was good enough today, not to get caught, because there's a lot of really dumb people that had ever been caught.

10:21Dumb luck plays a lot into these things as well. But I, because I will never, ever give credit to people to do this type of thing as having high intelligence or high EQ or IQ. Well, and two, if we look at, if we look at just B&E's and the amount that take place, and the amount that actually gets solved, if this was that gone bad, the good chunk of them never gets solved. Yep. That's that. And if this was, so in its simplicity, people get away with that shit all the time. Yep. The fact that we have a missing person here with it who could possibly be dead, it makes it a different type of case, because it doesn't, if she's dead, let's assume she's dead for the sake of the argument. It makes it a different type of case, because it wasn't, I'm gonna go with probably not intentional homicide here.

11:23Something happened, it was not exactly what another homicide case may look like in terms of how they would investigate it, because essentially it's just the caveat here. The one off here is the fact that there's a body they had to get rid of as well. And if it was as simple as picking her up and taking her out, it's basically a B&E that took a person with them. And if they know how to dispose of the person, or it, I don't know, it changes the dynamic. It really, this is a not, this doesn't fit the traditional B&E route, this doesn't fit the traditional route of a kidnapping, this doesn't fit the traditional route of a homicide, because I think it was never meant to be that. It was meant to be something far simpler, far less involved. And this is what we got. And somebody knows now how not to get caught. Yeah, well, if you look at, and I'm seeing all the comments, which is great. And again, I just, I just play the averages of the research and the research still edges about 60%

12:25that this was a solo act, but could there be other people accomplices involved in that side house? Yeah, there's all kinds of things that could happen in this. But if you look at the intent, or I always go back to intent, as I said, John Douglas, first profile in the FBI says, is that you got to look at the intent. If the intent in some way was profit, either profiting by taking her and branching in her, or profit by stealing something complete failure, that's what I'm talking about. Now, successfully getting away so far, but the intent was a complete failure. And if someone says, because I hear it out there with a conspiracy theorist, the intent was to get back at Nancy, to not Nancy, but Savannah, to make her suffer. And all these things, okay, well, if we look at all the research on that, there is always then some messaging that goes out, especially, if for some crazy reason that the messaging going into TMZ was anywhere related, not a spearfishing attempt like I think it is in others, then why not put out somewhere in media that,

13:27hey, this was because Savannah was XY and Z. And it's not there because it wasn't. There was a profit motive in here in some way. So if people want to believe it was for her abduction, okay. That didn't work. Or for people like me that I think it was a B&E that went sideways, still failed. So that's where you always got to go back to, well, was he intent where did it fall apart? And what did this guy do? Well, well, he hit his identity good enough today to not have it happen. I think people oftentimes conflate, sophisticated with successful. Sometimes simple can be successful. Very simple can be successful. And that might be what we're looking at here. Yeah, I think so. Man, we've covered so many cases where the simplest answer is usually what happens. The more time that passes and the less information we have, the more we like to fill the gaps with conjecture. And a lot of times the conjecture will spool out of control

14:28and it's easy to cascade out. I remember you made such a profound statement a couple of weeks ago when you said it's not a far leap. But when you cascade so many conspiracies on this and then we think it's this and then this, the leap from here to here of crazy is so small. But when you then go back down to the grassroots level of what's the intent? The intent is profit. It failed. And what could be the profit? And I'll still entertain both sides that the main intent was abduction or the main intent was being ego on sideways. Either way, complete failure except in the fact that he hit his identity well enough to not be found yet. When we're this far in now, we're going on week five and seemingly at least on the outside, we don't know much. They seem to still be asking the public for any information that they can glean off of it. Do you think we're ever going to figure out who this guy is at this point? Or you know, statistically there's a lot of these cases

15:31that just go nowhere. The fact that we have a microscope on this doesn't necessarily change that fact. It just means more of us are watching. But not getting an answer to things like this and missing person's case. That's incredibly common. The latter is not. Yeah, I got two sides of this one, two Tony. Yeah. The probability at this point of finding her it diminishes more and more everyday. Again, the research says that we are more and more in the likelihood of not. But and I know we'll cover this the next segment. But if you look at the success rate of Pena County Sheriff's Office when it comes to solving homicides or abduction like this last year, they had 12 or 12, they're 100%. I don't want to say like this because I think like this cave gets it into those type of a bucket. And I don't think this is the same bucket. Right, but so we have a missing person that inevitably is going to be in a homicide.

16:33I think so when you're looking at strictly homicides, that's where they have what I'm saying when I say they're a success rate of clearance rate, their investigators are really, really good. I think they're detectives. And as we said this from the beginning too, I even from the very beginning, I kind of dismissed the sheriff to the side because kind of the vibe I was getting from the investigative side, seeing pretty spot on, I saw a lot of movement. I saw a lot of things happening at that investigative level. That's below the executive level that is the mouthpiece of the organization. And when I did the deep dive this past week and I was, I was even more impressed than I thought it was going to be by it. So their investigators are some of the best in the country. So if you're looking at national average, the probability is low. But if you're looking at Pena County, the probability is high. And I think this is a key point to make. Also, I really wish they would come out and highlight some of these stats to the public because you know, you have it right now in my mind,

17:35we have a two prong attack going after the perpetrator of this slash people who are waiting to who did this that are the ones that could call in a tip and say who this was and solve this thing, right? In order to do that, you have to compel them to want to. They have to feel unsafe. They have to feel like the news is closing on on them and they're gonna go to prison if they don't come forward, something like that. Savannah is doing beautiful messaging. Matter of fact, it's always pretty interesting to me that after we come out on our show of what we think would be a very good method for her to use to use its empathetic appeal to give that olive branch to say, hey, you know, things go sideways. You probably didn't mean it to be like this, so that you can draw someone out and want to. But in order for them to want to grab that olive branch, there has to be pressure in another area to force them through. That pressure comes from investigation saying we're getting closer. We're getting closer and then giving data points exactly what they're getting closer on not the next day, the share of saying, well, the DNA fell through.

18:38But what you can do is you can roll out stats like I just researched this last week and say, hey, listen, the rate of successful investigations of the turnarounds of this, clearing rates, best in the country. I mean, this county ranks in the top in the country for clearance rates of not this type of crime, but homicides. That puts pressure on. It does. It does. I think it needs to be caveated, though, with there has been a lot of criticism of his department, a lot of criticism about cutting corners. So I mean, without doing a deep, I mean, doing it and the thing is that's another rabbit hole, too, to deep dive into is, okay, well, is there criticism of this? I mean, not just for the sake of criticism of like, oh, you're doing a good job. Let me tear you down. No, if you're doing a good job, great. But how do you have such a good success rate here and so much noise around you of distrust and hate? There's something going on here. And there is a lot of issues within the department.

19:40There's a lot of people who have been demoted and they've claimed for political reasons, good investigators, good people who have working in the department for years, who have contributed to that success rate, no longer in those positions. You have, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of questions and a lot of questions of cutting corners on some of those very investigations that have the, you know, 100% success rate. So I guess a question is, you know, how did you get to point of checking the box of successfully, you know, we've investigated this, we got our, the right guy, do we though? Yes, you know, I mean, that would be an interesting one to go down that rabbit hole, too. And I think it was like 12, I mean, there's not a ton of homicides here every year in this county. I looked at all these numbers. I, and I even went down to the actual allegations against the sheriff, the internal comment. Sure, yeah. I looked at everything, you know, I do, I still wait too much time in this in my life. And actually, to the viewers comment a few minutes ago,

20:41the FBI should have been called in on lead. Actually, they don't have jurisdiction because it's not cross, it's not cross state. It's only, if it's, it remains in the state and at the local level, if it doesn't have interstate, things going on, so it could not be handed off as FBI's primary in situation because there's not a statute that the FBI could cover on this one. So that answers that question. And it's not saying that you're wrong. It's like it'd be great, but it just, there's not a mechanism for that. And when it comes to the internal stuff, because I went down this rabbit hole, too, Tony. So the internal allegations against the sheriff, those allegations actually, they fall in with the norms of every elected to sheriff across the country. There's that, actually, that is actually pretty normal. Now, I was saying that the normals acceptable, it's just, it's normal. The vast majority of them are anonymous. There's been two, they're only named by person is actually the deputy and the former one that ran against him. And so those allegations are actually,

21:41they're, they're talking about leadership style internally. They're talking about issues. That is a very, very common complaint. It's not, there's, in other words, everything internally that they're saying about him is hitting baseline of what typically happens with an elected official in a crime of this case that hits this notoriety. I'm not, this is not excusing any behavior that we don't like, that we don't think is right. I'm just telling you, it falls within the norms because I went in, it's always funny. I go into my own confirmation bias. This is saying, I think we probably have something here. I'm gonna look it up and we'll probably find the smoking gun and we're gonna get a great clickbait on it. And we're gonna say, this guy's bad because X, Y and Z. You know what happens? Baseline, baseline, baseline. Except the clearance rate. Now, I'm not crediting the sheriff of the clearance rate. I'm crediting his team with the clearance rate. Now, he's the head of it so he gets credit for it, but when it comes to it, he's on track. Now, granted, 12 homicides cleared last year. That's not a lot, but for the county he has size,

22:43it's slightly below the average of other suburban counties across the country. I got all the stats here. There are few counties that are better. Maricopa County, with Joe, or Arropo Hillsboro counties, Wake County Sheriff's Department in Eroly, Tampa, Dallas on these suburbs. They have slightly above his averages for clearance rates, but not much. All the rest across the country for the same size of the population, he's above way above because the clearance rates on them are roughly 50, 60% on the best. So you know what I mean? You just keep going down the rabbit hole because that way, what I'm hoping to do in this is kind of clear the, calm the noise and let them do their job. And then they know like someone else if you don't like them next time. Because yeah, is he dislikable? Yes, does he do things that, does his image contrast with what we expect and want him to do? Do we want him to go in basketball games and we're going to the gym the next morning where people can see that he's out and about just living life normally when there's a big investigation on? No, because he doesn't have that kind of self-awareness

23:43that he shouldn't be doing that kind of shit, but he was. But does it affect, but is it affecting the investigation? I don't think it did. Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Briewski and the Hidden Killers podcast. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chamba. Jump in at chambacasino.com. Let's Chamba. No purchase necessary. BTW Group, Boy, We're Prohibited by Ma. CCNC, 21 Plus, sponsored by Chamba Casino. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cham-nak. Looking for excitement? Chamba Casino is here. Play anytime, play anywhere. Play on the train, play at the store, play at home, play with your board. Play today for your chance to win and get daily bonuses when you log in. So why are you waiting for, don't delay? Chamba Casino is free to play. Experience social gameplay like never before. Go to Chamba Casino right now to play hundreds of games, including online slots, bingo, slingo, and more. Live the Chamba life at chambacasino.com. No purchase necessary, VGW Group void for prohibited by law, 21-plus terms and conditions apply.

24:49Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with Chamba by my side. Race to ChambaCasino.com, let's Chamba. No purchase necessary, VGW Group void for prohibited by law, CTSC's, 21-plus, sponsored by Chamba Casino.