Nancy Guthrie investigation takes dramatic new focus as clock runs out on ransom deadline: Brown bags of ‘evidence’ and uncomfortable questions close to home

As the Monday deadline for payment of the ransom demanded for the return of Nancy Guthrie passes without proof of life, or consequence, her family and investigators must face the cruel potential reality that this entire line of enquiry has been a hoax.

Former SWAT team captain Josh Schirard told the Daily Mail: ‘The deadline passing just tells law enforcement we need to close this particular path of investigation and continue putting efforts and resources and assets into the ones that might be more viable.’

Schirard was speaking as the clock ran out on the 5pm Arizona local time deadline that the supposed kidnappers had issued along with a reported demand for $6million in Bitcoin. That figure has not been confirmed.

With no direct line of communication established between the Guthrie family and those claiming to have abducted 84-year-old Nancy, her NBC star daughter Savannah took to Instagram just hours ahead of the deadline to post a video pleading for information that might lead to her mother’s safe return.

The family were, Savannah said, in an ‘hour of desperation.’ On Saturday, she had posted a video promising the faceless abductors, ‘We will pay.’

Now, according to Schirard, the Guthries must face the fact that their desperation has likely been exploited by opportunists who know nothing of Nancy’s whereabouts and have wasted law enforcement’s time and the family’s emotions.

Schirard said: ‘Everyone has questioned the legitimacy and authenticity of these ransom notes and… this just tells us that, okay, this wasn’t real.’

Veteran FBI Special Agent Lance Leising, based in Arizona, agreed, suggesting that the fact that the notes were sent to media outlets in recent days, rather than negotiators of family members, was an early red flag to those experienced in such matters.

He said: ‘In legitimate ransom cases kidnappers move fast. They establish leverage quickly. Communication begins within hours, not days, of an abduction. Proof of life is produced early and often. Here, the opposite happened. This case has not followed the history of a typical kidnapping at all.’

Schirard said: ‘It’s horrible that somebody would do this, but we have to refocus efforts on things that are much more likely to produce results.’

But make no mistake, the former SWAT team captain said, the FBI and local sheriff’s department have already been running parallel lines of investigation, including the possibility that this is a homicide and that the perpetrator is someone close to Nancy and her family.

He said: ‘We can’t rule anything out. You know, if this is an abduction, 90 percent of abductions involve someone that the abducted person knows and a lot of times that’s unfortunately family or someone very, very close to family.’

To that end, Schirard said, law enforcement may withhold or manipulate the release of information as an ‘investigative tool’ to draw any suspects out by lulling them into a false sense of security.

He explained: ‘If they think, “Oh man they’re not even close to this,” then they may drop their guard and that’s when you start to pick up other evidence and clues.’

Nancy was last seen by her daughter Annie and her son-in-law Tommaso Cioni, Annie’s husband, on January 31.

On that Saturday night, Nancy had dinner at their home and was driven back to her nearby $1million property in Tucson, Arizona, by family shortly before 10pm.

At 2.28am on Sunday, her pacemaker disconnected from her phone.

Ever since, there seems to have been very little in the way of substantial search developments.

Despite a troubling scene, blood found spattered on her porch and a ring doorbell camera ripped from its moorings, cops turned the crime scene back to family on Tuesday, February 3, before returning 24 hours later to put police tape back-up.

That misstep may cost prosecutors dearly in any eventual trial as, Schirard pointed out, the scene was likely rendered so contaminated that any evidence collected by investigators after it had been opened and resealed will likely be inadmissible in court.

He said: ‘It’s a lot easier, especially when it comes to securing crime scenes, securing witnesses, to be very aggressive with that and dial it back than it is to be very timid with it and lackadaisical and then try to ramp it up, which unfortunately is what we’ve had to do here. There are certain things that are going to be very difficult to bring to court.

‘It could prove to be challenging for the prosecutors down the road to introduce some of that evidence because they did open the crime scene up. But that doesn’t mean that it’s useless.’

Indeed, across the weekend cops continued to be search for and retrieve evidence for further processing.

On Saturday, authorities were spotted conducting a late-night search of Annie Guthrie’s home.

Police took photographs at Annie and husband Cioni’s property until around 10.30pm, NewsNation reported.

An agent was said to be seen carrying a silver briefcase into the home.

According to Schirard, that was a Cellebrite case. ‘Cellebrite is a company that specializes in recovering digital forensic evidence,’ he said. ‘So, we use Cellebrite pretty extensively to recover digital evidence from phones, devices, tablets, computers.

‘When you delete a picture off your phone, it’s not actually gone. When you delete a picture or a Word document from a hard drive, it’s not actually gone. Cellebrite can go in and pull all this. So, text messages, photos, location data, phone calls, all this stuff can be retrieved.

‘It’s likely that [police] were possibly looking at some of the family’s devices.’

Authorities were also seen leaving the property with several brown paper bags. Schirard said: ‘My educated assumption is that they’re removing items to process further in a controlled lab.’

The following day police were back at Nancy’s property searching the septic tank – looking, Schirard told the Daily Mail, for any evidence that had been flushed in a misguided bid to dispose of it.

He said: ‘A lot of people forget that having a septic tank means wastewater doesn’t go into a city sewer, it goes into the tank.

‘So, somebody may have flushed something thinking that would get rid of it, but instead it would actually just be deposited in the septic tank. It is a possibility that [investigators] are now trying to make sure that there’s nothing in there that could indicate any kind of guilt.’

He added: ‘The ransom is just one of many avenues that police are pursuing and it passing is just closing one door so that we can really pursue some of the ones that remain open out there.

‘Until we can prove that she’s not alive somewhere, they will conduct this as a rescue operation. When you switch to focusing on a recovery [of a body] there’s a pivot, a shift in attitude, things tend to slow down.

‘At the end of the day it’s not going to hurt the investigation or anyone to try to keep hope alive.’

Additional reporting: James Reinl