00:17:20.460Well, basically, since my bed's already made, the most important thing you have to do is to make sure this top sheet is really pulled in here tightly.
00:17:30.400Because that's going to give you your smooth corner.
00:18:28.860It doesn't look like a particularly spacious room.
00:18:30.980Maureen, what were your thoughts when you saw it?
00:18:33.520Well, I looked at some things that I thought would be part of a ransom note.
00:18:37.980For example, that wardrobe piece of furniture off to the left where a gentleman would hang his sport coat for the next night and the shoes go on the bottom.
00:18:47.680It's got a little thing generally for, like, cufflinks or whatever.
00:18:51.200It's an old-time, very distinctive piece of furniture that a lot of people don't necessarily have anymore.
00:18:57.880So they could have used that as something where they're like, whoa, this is legit because she has this thing and, you know, it's not something a lot of people have.
00:19:07.720Who would know she had this in her room?
00:19:10.860We would also, they could have described that very distinctive headboard, which is almost Spanish in style.
00:19:17.160And, you know, like a lot of people, my mom never changed her bedroom furniture after our dad passed away.
00:19:35.200And it's the way, and if you were in a loving marriage, like your mom, my mom and dad, when one of them, when my dad passed away, she didn't want to change anything.
00:19:45.680She wanted it to remain the same and it stayed the exact same until she sold the house.
00:19:51.300So, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff in there that someone could have used nefariously in one of those ransom notes to, in order to get the law, the authorities to believe them.
00:20:05.440What did you think when you saw it, Fitz?
00:20:08.160You know, I put my behavioral cap on upon seeing, and just right now, Megan, is the first time I watched that video.
00:20:16.560And, you know, a lot of celebrities out there, a lot of on-air personalities have mothers, have loved ones.
00:20:24.180But Savannah really took it to the next level in showcasing her mother.
00:20:27.960And these are very human, very emotional, and they're very moving sort of little segments she put together.
00:20:33.420And it just has me thinking, if you are, in fact, someone out there suffering from some condition like erotomania, you're basically a stalker.
00:20:43.860Again, I don't think this was ever about money.
00:20:45.640What is more valuable to Savannah, to someone like her, that you may have some sort of a fixation or obsession about?
00:20:55.680And maybe, you know, you can't get to her kids.
00:20:57.320You don't want to mess with, you know, people that young.
00:20:59.220Boy, and this mother happens to live in sort of a remote area with neighbors far away.
00:21:04.980And look how much she means to Savannah.
00:21:07.740And, boy, I feel like I know her mother as well as I know Savannah from watching her on TV every day.
00:21:13.460Let me go pay a visit, and let me go do something with this.
00:21:16.100I can't say I'm locking into this theory, and this didn't happen in a vacuum.
00:21:21.280There's been emails to Savannah over the years, maybe going as far back as when mom, you know, did the bedroom interview.
00:21:27.960So I can't imagine that this personal connection between this personality on the air and the fondness and the connection and the closeness she had to her mother weren't interrelated.
00:21:42.120I'm not blaming Savannah for anything here.
00:21:44.180She had every right to put her mother on the air.
00:21:48.700But could this somehow be a person or persons out there who didn't have that relationship with their own mother, wanted something with Savannah, couldn't get to Savannah or kids, so they chose her own mother as some sort of a Freudian substitute?
00:22:06.100But I have no doubt that the person who abducted Nancy Guthrie is familiar with all these types of videos we've just seen.
00:22:13.300They may even have, like, a trophy reel they can play over and over again.
00:22:16.980And therefore, with Savannah not being a prime target or an available target or readily available, they go after her mom.
00:22:23.360To me, it was one of the things that was creepy about the video in retrospect, not, you know, in the moment, was that it was a very small space between the, you know, that her, what I assume is her side of the bed, the bedside table was right there with her books on it, and the wall.
00:22:38.280You know, like, this intruder, if he came in there and actually did grab her from her bed, as Savannah said, he had to squeeze in there, and he would have been right on top of her.
00:22:48.540You know, I mean, he would have been right over her.
00:22:50.860And, you know, how we heard she had pretty powerful hearing aids, it just doesn't seem like that would have been an issue at all.
00:22:57.940Seems like rather close quarters where he would have been able to get right up on her next to the bed in a rather small space and order her out.
00:23:07.860It's so scary to think about and not a lot of room to maneuver because she had quite a few furniture pieces in that one little corner of her bedroom.
00:23:16.640So that's where we believe the crime took place, according to Savannah, and it's just eerie to see it up close and personal.
00:23:45.680They really wanted my children on the air, and finally I relented, but I insisted that they blur all of their faces.
00:23:51.960Like, we did a camping spot with my family, and I was the only one who had their children's faces blurred.
00:23:59.360I'm like, do not show anything that's identifying about my kids.
00:24:03.580But they're so desperate to show the audience, like, see, it's just one big happy family, and you need to love all of our anchors who are family, women, and men.
00:24:11.940And, like, I knew with my kids that this would be endangering.
00:24:15.700I confess, even with my mom, who did wind up on my show at NBC, didn't even think about it, Fitz.
00:24:21.520Didn't even consider, like, your mom as a potential source of danger because it, much in the way, like, this is like a new invention.
00:24:29.560It's like a new way of thinking of how to hurt a public figure.
00:24:32.320It's one of the many downsides of this horrible case.
00:24:34.240Yeah, and I just want to go back to the bedroom scene.
00:24:37.720You can be the toughest MMA fighter, Navy SEAL, trained FBI, SWAT person, all those things.
00:24:43.440You're sound asleep in REM, rapid eye movement, and you open up, and there's a masked man with that kind of look that we see on the video standing over top of you.
00:24:51.320And, you know, you're going to panic, and some will turn over and hide, and some will pull the pillow over.
00:24:58.120Some may get up and fight, but that person definitely has an advantage over you, an 84-year-old woman, you know, without her hearing aids in, and, you know, who knows what her med level was even at that night.
00:25:08.840So that had to be the most scary moment for her.
00:25:13.180But, yeah, the whole family thing, I mean, I've interviewed stalkers.
00:25:17.660I've worked these type cases, and a lot of them had to do with on-air female personalities, such as yourself, Megan, over the years, especially with NBC.
00:25:27.480I was in New York, and I had a direct pipeline to their director of security, and Anne Curry and a number of others were getting threats all the time, and we had to go out and send leads to other parts of the country.
00:25:37.460And so it's one thing interpersonal, looking at the screen and seeing your object of obsession, but then they bring in mothers and perhaps children, and kudos to you for at least blurring out their faces on your particular segment that you talked about, Megan.
00:25:53.880And it just becomes all that more personal, and I just can't rule out that there's someone out there because everything else doesn't make sense about this case.
00:26:02.980Obviously, it's not money-oriented, et cetera.
00:26:04.840It's to have some sort of an obsession with Savannah and then now be almost like you're part of her family, and the blood takes away from that, as if Nancy was injured, but because she may have put up a fight of some sort.
00:26:19.560But this person may have just wanted to have part of Savannah with him for however long, a few hours, a few days, or weeks.
00:26:26.200And that's just becoming more and more of a possibility as I see it.
00:26:30.920And these videos over the years, no fault of Savannah.
00:26:33.980You can blame it on NBC if you want, but it's certainly a person who's already predisposed to aberrant behavior and plotting something like this.
00:26:43.640He may have seen this thing live, and I forget when you said this bedroom thing was 10 or 12 years ago.
00:26:48.120He may have seen this live, and the fantasies started then, and I said, oh, I love Savannah so much.
00:26:57.160There could have been a knock at the door over the years, and no one made anything of it.
00:27:01.720And I have no doubt that there's been some interaction on this person's part prior.
00:27:06.760Exactly what it was, with other family members we don't know, emails, but it's going to be there, and that's what investigators have to look for and search for.
00:27:15.100And these videos, unfortunately, didn't help.
00:27:18.000And I think other anchors and news personalities such as yourself, you know this already, but leave the family out of it and even mention them as minimally as necessary.
00:27:51.560Her old bedroom is still there, and she probably wouldn't notice initially if some school trophy from seventh grade was missing or something along those lines.
00:28:03.240Because they were looking for her mom.
00:28:05.860It also answers the question of what were they doing in there for 41 minutes.
00:28:10.300He was, you know, he could have been upstairs trying to find trophies, ones that would really satiate his needs and desire.
00:28:17.740Well, and we don't know for sure if he was in there for 41 minutes because we never really totally understood how it was at 1.47 a.m. that the ring cameras went offline, and then at 2.12 a.m. that an image was detected.
00:28:33.040And we think, but we don't know, that the video of the man on the porch was the 2.12 time frame.
00:28:40.120So I, you know, what happened between 1.47 and 2.12 with the man, we don't know if that's actually how this went down.
00:28:46.660But that would shorten the timeline that he was inside from 2.12 to 2.28.
00:28:50.400Still plenty of time to go rifling around in Savannah's childhood bedroom and to mess with Nancy, too.
00:28:57.400It's still a long time to get in there and shouldn't have taken that long to get Nancy out.
00:29:02.700But one of the many mysteries in this case.
00:29:06.260So he's changed his messaging again on whether there's a threat to the community in a way that I would argue seems to undermine that this is a stalker, that this is an NBC News stalker or family member.
00:29:21.040Just to take you back through it, at the beginning of the investigation, the sheriff said this about whether there was a public safety threat, SOT 21.
00:29:30.200With this being an active crime scene, is there a threat to the general public?
00:29:37.680Well, you know, no, I don't think there's an active threat, but I hate to say that because, you know, we're going to canvass that neighborhood and maybe there's a prowler been seen around.
00:30:05.680And so there when you say a threat to the public, is there somebody out there who's kidnapping elderly people in the middle of the night every night?
00:31:27.360I kind of just stopped listening to him a while ago because he should have hired his PIO.
00:31:35.220His PIO should have been the person delivering a clear and concise message.
00:31:39.140They should have been working with the FBI's PIO, and it should have just been delivered regularly in an organized fashion with no back and forth.
00:32:14.900Well, he's covering his ass, to be CYA, to be blunt there at the end with those other statements.
00:32:20.660He wants to make sure if anything by chance does happen, again, something similar, even in some other part of the country that can somehow be linked to this.
00:32:29.700He doesn't want to be the one that they quote, at least his last quote, that, well, it could never happen anywhere.
00:33:08.320And and then that, you know, we've said all along when we were together, Megan with Maureen and others, that, you know, the investigators know a lot more than we do.
00:33:17.260And for him to say early on, at least, that they know why she was targeted, that means they have motivation listed.
00:33:23.900And if they think it was kidnapping earlier for profit, that seems to have been put, you know, off the shelf there.
00:33:29.820So I would like to hear more about why the person was targeted or why Mrs. Guthrie was targeted.
00:33:35.920But they're keeping keeping that close to the vest, obviously.
00:33:39.180To your point, Maureen, you take everything the sheriff says with a grain of salt.
00:33:58.680They just may be having a hard time proving it.
00:34:01.660But if you look at the Corey Richens case, that took over, what, a year and several months before she got arrested, before they were able to really build a case.
00:34:11.740And building a case is like building a cage.
00:34:13.780You're doing it link by link by link by link.
00:34:17.480And, you know, you have to have a certain sense of confidence.
00:34:20.120And for him to say, you know, no one's really safe.
00:34:23.860He may just be saying, hey, we're not we know what the motive is, but we don't know who you are to give the offender a sense of security or something where he doesn't feel like he's in that cage yet because they want him to trip up.
00:34:37.600I've always had the feeling since the beginning that they're trying to get him to trip up and they they as far as we know, haven't been able to.
00:34:45.480But we don't know everything they know.
00:34:47.380They could have another another legitimate ransom note for all we know.
00:34:52.980And if it went straight to the FBI, we wouldn't know about it.
00:34:56.580And we don't know whether his statements suggesting they didn't find anything from the DNA and the backpack investigation didn't go anywhere is true.
00:35:06.160We don't know whether any of those statements to us are true.
00:35:09.140He has no obligation to tell us the truth.
00:35:11.140And they often use the media for subterfuge around what the suspect may be hearing.
00:35:16.200So everything's got that huge grain of salt.
00:35:19.220It's the it's the huge core sea salt grain of salt, not the tiny table salt salt that you get at the deli.
00:35:25.340Yeah, I want to talk about the blood because this is something that's always bothered me.
00:35:30.060We have the blood spatter outside of the house, outside the front door.
00:35:36.480And we saw those the video of those drops in the sort of the front patio area.
00:35:41.820And then we saw Fox News release more video.
00:35:44.720This is Brian Enten's video here showing the blood right outside of the front door.
00:35:48.440And then we saw more blood when Fox News released its own video showing that the blood continued down the walkway from this area here toward the driveway, the circular driveway.
00:36:03.840Now, in the video that we see of the perpetrator, we don't see a car sitting in the driveway.
00:36:08.660But that doesn't mean it wasn't there because we couldn't.
00:36:31.700But one of the things that's always bothered me, you guys, is that, as you know, when you're trying a case, you bring in an expert.
00:36:38.380You don't, you know, you typically in any criminal trial, you will have the prosecution will call or the defense sometimes will call a witness in and put that person on the stand as an expert.
00:36:53.800And, you know, this is going to be extremely relevant in this case, too.
00:36:57.360Law enforcement did confirm that this is Nancy's blood.
00:37:01.580But what else can we deduce about that, right?
00:37:04.360Like, what else can we tell from these droplets?
00:37:06.580We've all had lots of speculation about, well, they look like this.
00:37:09.760It's probably straight up and down blood drops.
00:37:12.660Well, let's check our speculation and bring in a true expert.
00:37:16.360Her name is Dr. Amy Santoro, and she's worked as a forensic scientist for 18 years.
00:37:21.220She's especially adept at analyzing blood at crime scenes.
00:37:25.280She's investigated over 1,000 cases, including more than 500 crime scenes, and holds a certification in bloodstain pattern analysis.
00:37:45.600The blood outside, I think, is really concerning because, to me, assuming that Ms. Guthrie is moving at, you know, somewhat of a walking pace, these bloodstains show that she's bleeding pretty quickly.
00:38:00.580I don't think we can tell from the stains.
00:38:03.060They look like drip stains to me, and those small dots of blood are what we would call satellite spatter.
00:38:08.040That happens when blood falls from a certain height onto a target surface like this.
00:38:12.440So, what I can tell is that the blood is falling from a height probably more than two feet, whether that's from her hand, her arm, her face.
00:38:20.220I don't think we can tell, but I think it's an indication that she is bleeding very quickly.
00:38:27.820There's so much blood out there that if you were walking, I don't think you would see that distribution of blood with a slower bleed.
00:38:35.980You can see there are multiple drip stains in that area.
00:38:39.220So, unless she's standing there stationary for a period of time, which, of course, is possible, although I think unlikely in an abduction, I think it shows that she really is bleeding pretty badly.
00:38:49.920Does that suggest to you that she had any particular kind of wound?
00:38:54.920I don't think we can say, and I think it's important to be conservative.
00:38:58.780I don't want to go out on a limb, and certainly I don't want to speculate on the severity of the injury other than to say I think it's fair to assume that there's some sort of quickly bleeding source.
00:39:12.220That could be just a tear to the skin on her arm.
00:39:16.920You can see even in some of her older media appearances that she has kind of a typical thin-skinned appearance that people tend to get when they're older.
00:39:27.000So, if there's some sort of struggle and her skin rips, that could cause it.
00:39:31.680If she receives some sort of blunt force trauma to the face, she gets hit in the face, that could cause it.
00:39:37.500You know, we often see blood dripping like this from a bleeding nose, but it really could be anything.
00:39:45.300Because it is a little odd that there's so many perfect droplets.
00:39:51.400You know, I don't know that we can rule anything out, but I do have some suspicion that perhaps she received this injury outside.
00:40:01.820And the reason I say that is because when I look at the video, I really don't see any blood in the area of the door.
00:40:09.780There's not any blood staining on the threshold.
00:40:12.200There's not any blood staining or doesn't appear to be any blood staining on the door itself, which makes me wonder if she's already outside past that threshold when she receives this injury.
00:40:25.280And if it's outside, you know, I know it's a fairly secluded area, but nobody heard anything.
00:40:31.240So, that's probably something more like a strike or, you know, just a simple skin tear and not some sort of injury that's going to cause a very loud noise.
00:40:41.060Why do you think that the blood droplets all appear to be intact?
00:40:46.160You know, I'm just picturing, like, Nancy possibly walking, possibly with a bloody nose.
00:40:52.400And it seems to me, especially with an elderly woman, that blood would fall, and then you'd likely step in it and possibly even drag your foot.
00:41:01.580You know, a lot of elderly people shuffle for, you know, stability's sake.
00:41:08.820Well, I do think that there are some stains that look a little bit strange.
00:41:12.920They're irregular in shape, which could be transfer stains from something like, you know, the blood on the bottom of her feet.
00:41:18.800But you're only going to step in that blood if you're standing in that area.
00:41:22.480And if you're getting pulled or dragged away and you're moving pretty quickly or you're being carried away, you're not going to be leaving those types of stains.
00:41:32.440You're not going to be stepping in that blood if you're moving away very quickly.
00:41:35.680There's just not an opportunity to do that.
00:41:38.060So you can't tell whether she walked of her own volition or was carried?
00:41:45.900I mean, you can see that there are some unusual-looking stains there, but I don't think it's enough to determine if it's from a foot, from a shoe.
00:41:55.380Also, I think it's important to understand that this is after the crime scene has been released.
00:42:00.660And we know that there was at least some sampling taken of these blood stains from crime scene responders.
00:42:06.180So they could have caused some alteration to the way these stains look by taking their swabs.
00:42:11.240You can see that parts of those blood stains are missing.
00:42:14.320The center of some of those blood stains are starting to flake away.
00:42:17.080Some of that could have been removed by crime scene responders as they're taking samples.
00:42:20.660This may go back to the question you already answered about what you can't rule anything out necessarily, but not having been to any murder crime scenes, can you say that this was not, for example, a gunshot or like a stabbing wound because those would have produced a lot more blood?
00:42:41.040I've heard some say this to me looks like a nosebleed where you get a fair amount of blood, but it falls pretty straightforward, you know, straight down as opposed to, forgive the term, but like a real gusher of a wound.
00:42:52.320Yeah, it doesn't seem like the type of blood staining that you would get from a very serious injury like a gunshot.
00:42:59.620We typically expect to see much smaller stains associated with a gunshot.
00:43:04.260And then once you are bleeding from a serious injury, we do tend to see a lot more blood.
00:43:10.580There are so many variables that can affect this.
00:43:13.160You know, people oftentimes just bleed internally.
00:43:15.720And certainly I've worked shooting homicides where there's almost no blood on scene, but it doesn't look to me like it's associated with something like a gunshot.
00:43:25.340There's patterns that I would expect to see in a gunshot case that I don't see here, but we don't know what the inside of the house looks like.
00:43:32.640Maureen and Fitz, do you guys have any questions you want to ask Amy?
00:43:40.400First, you think that these blood stains are consistent with someone moving quickly across the porch?
00:43:47.980Well, I think the blood source is bleeding quickly because you can see all of these drips, right?
00:43:53.980So if you're standing on this porch for a minute, you can be bleeding slowly, drip, drip, drip.
00:44:02.900But that's probably not the situation.
00:44:05.760You probably aren't hanging out, having a conversation out here at 2.30 in the morning in the middle of an abduction.
00:44:11.380If you're trying to take Mrs. Guthrie away from the house, you're trying to get out of there.
00:44:17.340So if she is being pulled or she is walking, then what we see is that much faster drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, a much more serious injury.
00:44:27.380Because there are quite a lot of stains there.
00:44:30.680Even down the sidewalk, you can see those stains are pretty close to each other.
00:44:35.100So however she is bleeding, it's replenishing quite quickly.
00:44:39.780But again, she's a lady of a certain age.
00:46:17.040Do you have any potential hypothesis as to why the blood drops stopped at a certain point?
00:46:25.860Well, you know, the first thing that I think when we have something like this, a trail of drip stains, and then they stop, is that person got into a car.
00:46:33.960That's the most obvious answer that kind of occurs to me.
00:46:37.800If there's some sort of pressure applied, even by Nancy Guthrie herself, that's going to lessen the amount of blood,
00:46:44.900which I think would suggest that she's able to at least tend to her wounds, maybe, you know, just able to put her hand over wherever is bleeding,
00:46:53.060or maybe able to move her clothing around to cover so that the blood is being absorbed into her clothing and not dripping onto the concrete anymore.
00:47:02.360But I think we really just don't know.
00:47:05.180Those are answers that we just don't have right now.
00:47:07.500I'd like to know what the rest of the driveway looked like at the beginning of crime scene processing.
00:47:14.520You know, it's interesting to me that there was this much blood that was left outside after the crime scene was released.
00:47:21.580That's probably not a choice that I would have made if I was managing this crime scene.
00:47:27.340But since we do know that crime scene responders were there before these images were taken,
00:47:32.240it's possible that there's more blood that was already collected and we just don't see it.
01:18:23.180Well, I think we can safely say he is consistent in his inconsistencies, and certainly when it comes to the family itself.
01:18:31.080And I hate – I hate, you know, this, you know, ruling out of family members or other people early on.
01:18:38.160And I can only envision a prosecutor someday getting this case if it so happens.
01:18:42.740It is somebody who was cleared in a case.
01:18:44.500I'll just keep it generic here, and they have to know – and they have to bring charges against that person and put them before a jury when a sheriff or some other DA or whomever said, no, no, no, they've been cleared all along.
01:19:06.080I still say one of the strongest family members – I hope they've interviewed and re-interviewed this person – was the child of Annie and Tommaso.
01:19:34.680I believe that person could be a wealth of information regardless of the age.
01:19:39.980And I believe they were in the house that night when Nancy came over for dinner to Annie and Tommaso's house.
01:19:45.760And, again, I'm not – again, careful here not to cast dispersions, but that person is sort of almost a neutral arbiter, wouldn't have enough sense at a relatively early age to know how to cover things up if, in fact, there is any sort of a cover-up.
01:19:59.400And there's experts out there, and I've known a few of them over the years with the FBI.
01:20:04.420They're full-time expertise is, in fact, interviewing young children, you know, three, four, five, even younger sometimes.
01:20:12.700But certainly an eight-year-old has their will and their wits about them.
01:20:44.340Does it tell us anything, Maureen, that he's telling the NBC affiliate, I've had my theory from day one, and I've – basically, I haven't moved off of it.
01:20:51.780I've only had more reason to believe my theory.
01:20:55.240And since day one, you know, I mean, day 17, he was saying, they're cleared.
01:21:03.260You know, he dialed it back a little by saying, well, none of them has been identified as a suspect.
01:21:09.400But does it tell us, potentially, that he doesn't believe the family had anything to do with it when he's saying, today, I've had the same theory since the beginning.
01:21:49.700And the other thing you should be doing with your PIO or your messaging in general is to assuage any of the fears that your constituents or the citizens of your AOR have.
01:23:00.240He says something, then he reverses it, then he dials it back a little, then he contradicts that.
01:23:04.480Then he does something that undermines all of it.
01:23:06.380And in the end, I have no idea about anything, which is why we finished this whole hour plus today.
01:23:14.500We don't actually have a leading theory right now amongst us on whether it was an intruder, it was a real kidnapper, it was a family member, or it was some random, you know, passerby or like a thief who went in there.
01:24:56.240But to your point, Fitz, of an age where you would be more than capable of speaking to what you had seen and witnessed with your grandma in your house that last night,
01:25:03.480and any other details, and maybe they did speak to him, and maybe that's why the cops were back there photographing me inside of that house at 1030 at night.
01:25:10.100As Maureen pointed out when we talked about it, the very same time that Nancy would have been inside the home, you know, just before she went missing.
01:25:52.860America can still be a dangerous place, and you cannot afford to wait for help.
01:25:57.520Sure, you could use a firearm, but in today's America, defending yourself with deadly force could have legal consequences.
01:26:03.440According to FBI data, 99.9% of all altercations do not require lethal force, and that's exactly why so many are turning to Berna.
01:26:12.940Berna is proudly American, hand-assembled in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
01:26:17.320These less-lethal self-defense launchers are trusted by hundreds of government agencies, law enforcement departments, and private security companies.
01:26:25.040Over 600,000 Berna pistols have been sold, most to private citizens who refuse to be victims.
01:26:30.560Berna launchers fire rock-hard kinetic rounds and powerful tear gas and pepper projectiles, capable of stopping a threat from up to 60 feet away.
01:26:39.480No background checks, no waiting periods, and Berna can ship straight to your door.