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Frank Figliuzzi is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. Subscribe to his Substack.
Illustration by Riley Levine
On Tuesday, the FBI publicly shared video and still images from Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell camera. That imagery revealed someone clothed head to toe in a knit ski mask, jacket, long pants, gloves, and wearing a heavy-looking backpack and a holstered pistol.
By far, this is the most significant evidence developed since 84-year-old Nancy was reported missing on February 1, despite teams of agents and deputies working around the clock for the past ten days. Nancy, who wears a pacemaker, has limited mobility and requires daily medication, is mother to three children: Annie, Camron, and NBC’s Today Show host Savannah Guthrie.
Ten days is forever when searching for a vulnerable victim. And the technological components of this case raise the question of whether we’ve entered a new, more challenging era of kidnapping investigations, in which it’s harder to know when someone is really abducted, held for ransom, and who did it.
Early in my FBI career, captors’ intent on exchanging a kidnapped victim for money often made their demands while moving amongst various pay phones across a city. This attempt at anonymization and masking of location meant that agents would have to fan out and physically surveil pay phones whenever the next demand call was expected. If a decision was made to pay a ransom, the abductors might insist that a simple bag of cash be placed under a tree in a park.
How things have changed.
Technology is usually way out in front of law enforcement, and the Guthrie case is no exception. Bad actors – who may or may not have any connection to Nancy’s abduction, were communicating via anonymized, difficult to attribute emails. Ransom demands contained instructions to electronically transmit millions of dollars in cryptocurrency bitcoin into a digital wallet. A man in California was arrested for transmitting a fake demand to the Guthrie family...
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