What the Nancy Guthrie Abductor Would Be Doing NOW as Images and Video From Nest Camera Released

What this episode is about

The discussion focuses on the psychological evaluation of an abductor, analyzing behaviors captured through a doorbell camera. Experts express caution in diagnosing the individual as a sociopath but point to indications of potential mental instability, such as narcissism and a mission-oriented mindset, while noting significant behavioral changes observed in the aftermath of the alleged crime.

Key takeaways

• Calmness in chaos can be chilling; not all cool heads are sane heads.
• Psychopaths may thrive on narrow missions, but their execution often drips with erratic desperation.
• The 'person of interest' label is a double-edged sword: relief for one, anxiety for another.
• Law enforcement's repeated visits indicate they’re not just fishing; actionable intel can redefine a case.
• Every arrest can redraw the map of guilt; the right person may just be hiding in plain sight.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Megyn Kelly (Guest) · 7 min speaking
• Fitz (Guest) · 5 min speaking
• Maren (Guest) · 4 min speaking
• Jim (Guest) · 2 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Richard Jewell
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Annie Guthrie, Eric Rudolph, Nancy Guthrie
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Columbine
4. 9:00 – 12:00: Nancy Guthrie, FBI, Birch Gold Group, Quantico
5. 12:00 – 15:00: Ted Kaczynski, FBI

Notable quotes from "What the Nancy Guthrie Abductor Would Be Doing NOW as Images and Video From Nest Camera Released"

• Wrong guy? If I can just start here and I'll let the other folks talk. But I think the term person of interest was coined during the Atlanta Olympic bombings. At least I never…

  about Richard Jewell · at 2:32

• Guthri's property in the back and all over with her neighbors going door to door. Annie Guthrie, not Nancy Guthrie, Annie Guthrie, where she had her dinner that night, but from…

  about Nancy Guthrie · at 4:16

• Talking about cases of the shootings from the time of Coline, which was 1999, we've had really thousands of shootings. That's a lot of data where we can now comfortably say this is the kind of person that we're looking at.

  about Columbine · at 8:29

• The offender accessed the victim. And Jim and I used to sit around in the conference room at Quantico and one of the first things that we did we would look at victimology. We…

  about Quantico · at 9:33

• Gold has risen over 700% in the last 20 years. and a never- ending list of reasons smart Americans diversify a portion of their savings into precious metals with Birch Gold…

  about Birch Gold Group · at 10:52

• Do you guys think that they can do the FBI? because I've heard two different experts now, former FBI both on the issue of facial rec recognition, notwithstanding the fact that he has a.

  about FBI · at 11:45

• In that case at that point eight nine years old from the first bombing was the you know now iconic composite sketch of the uni bomber and that's all they had for evidence. He…

  about Ted Kaczynski · at 12:45

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Nancy Guthrie — Person · Referenced victim (kidnapping case subject) · 2 mentions · first at 4:22
  Central victim in the kidnapping discussion; her victimology (low-risk victim, taken from home) is used to frame profiling and investigative decisions.
• Annie Guthrie — Person · Referenced witness/associated person tied to searched property · 2 mentions · first at 4:22
  Her property is repeatedly searched; the discussion focuses on why law enforcement keeps returning there and clarifies she is not Nancy Guthrie.
  Where the garage door went up, 9:50 it went down. So, you tell me why law enforcement was flooding the field around Annie Guthri's home last night.
• Richard Jewell — Person · Referenced case figure (wrongly accused 'person of interest') · 1 mention · first at 2:51
  Used as a historical analogy for how law enforcement/media can misidentify a suspect (Atlanta Olympics bombing).
• Eric Rudolph — Person · Referenced perpetrator (Atlanta Olympics bomber) · 2 mentions · first at 3:05
  Cited as the actual offender in the Atlanta Olympic bombing, contrasted with Richard Jewell’s wrongful suspicion to discuss offender relief when police detain the wrong person.
  At the time, but I had nothing to do with anything with Richard Juul interviews. And then years, a year or two later, we found out it was Eric Rudolph was the Olympic bomber.…
• Ted Kaczynski — Person · Referenced perpetrator (Unabomber) for investigative comparison · 2 mentions · first at 12:52
  Referenced to discuss pre-AI investigative limits (composite sketches) and offender countermeasures/disguise, contrasting a long-running case with the current one.

Companies & orgs

• FBI — Company · Referenced organization · 2 mentions · first at 11:45
  Discussed in the context of criminal investigations and facial recognition technology.

Places & events

• Quantico — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 9:39
  Mentioned as a location where FBI profiling work was conducted.
• Columbine — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at 8:35
  Mentioned as a historical reference point for school shootings and profiling.

Sponsors

• Birch Gold Group — Company · Sponsor · 1 mention · first at 11:01
  Promoted as a service for diversifying savings into precious metals, mentioned in an ad read.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Fitz, you do the same kind of work. Can we look at this and say this guy's a sociopath because he's so calm or you can't glean such a thing from doorbell camera tape.

0:09 Yeah. And I'm hesitant to do psychals, you know, uh without having sit down with a person. I'm not a psychologist, by the way, nor would I try to. But we can certainly render opinions in terms of indications of some sort of mental instability, whether diagnosible or not. And I mentioned yesterday, you know, this guy may be on the psych uh psychopath scale somewhere, psychopathy scale uh and in in terms of his narcissism, lack of emp uh empathy, which was which I mentioned yesterday, and sympathy towards other and this guy is just like he gets focused on his particular mission at hand. And I said, you know, since last week, this person's missionoriented. The implementation didn't look all that pretty when we finally saw how it was undertaken, but he, you know, he knew how to get there.

0:55 He knew basically what to do to get in the door with a successful abduction. Not a successful kidnapping so far as far as we know. We'll talk more about the six million. So, uh, yeah, the psycho val on someone like this, I'm always hesitant to do that. I also don't want to give down the line defense attorneys any kind of, uh, you know, potential defense there from, you know, this profiler Fitzgerald guy who said this early on. So, uh, indicators of some sort of mental health issues, very possible, but I'm I'm not prepared to go officially, nor would I, nor could I do any kind of a psycho val, but, uh, people are going to know this type of behavior. He's going to have an he's going to be an oddball of some sort.

1:32 Another clinical term I'll use here, but uh, and and most importantly, and and we'll get more into this later, but there's been a behavioral modification in the last week and a half with this guy. Free offense, post offense, and even more post video. And that's what I'd like to talk about at some point down the line here with you Megan

1:50 because he's in a panic now. Yes. This happened which you didn't plan on. His face his face is everywhere. I mean I wonder how the arrest not the arrest but the the detainment of the wrong guy last night affects the actual per right. He's he there had to be a serious moment of panic when those pictures hit and then there they've stopped what they say is the wrong guy and SWATs at his house and so on. That's got to be somewhat reassuring. They don't have you yet. You've got time to get out of town to I don't stay underground. I'm not sure like what what would you three think the per would do in the wake of the the wrong guy? If I can just start here and I'll let the other folks talk. But I think the term person of interest was coined during the Atlanta Olympic bombings. At least I never heard that term before. It's not really a legal term. It's less than suspect or or subject somewhere in the middle there.

2:48 And uh and that was for Richard Juel and uh he went through hell with the FBI and the media back then involving lawsuits. I I was there doing some uh consulting at the time, but I had nothing to do with anything with Richard Juul interviews. And then years, you know, a year or two later, we found out it was Eric Rudolph was the Olympic bomber. And uh we always, you know, commented among ourselves that how relieved he must have been that first few months. The actual bomber of the of the Olympics had killed two people. Here, here's a security guard, the one being accused. So, I'm just bringing in, you know, cases I've worked in the past. So yeah, the real kidnapper, the guy on the screen, uh, the video and, you know, ostensibly if there's kidnappers out there, they're saying, "Oh, good. Let them stop someone else and get him." But they're also going to know, I would think, that he's going to be ruled in or ruled out pretty

3:37 quickly. And fortunately, this is not a Richard Jules situation. He was ruled out within a few hours and uh, and let go and now he's getting his interviews. So, uh, but a moment of relief perhaps for the guy on the video, but now he's back scared again and his behavior is still sort of erratic based on the the baseline of what people knew him from before.

3:57 Here's the other question I have for you guys, and you can comment on that, too. But Moren, what about the fact that there were tons of reports last night that SWAT was there, hostage rescue was there, and that officials, I don't know if it was FBI or local sheriffs, but cops were all over yet again Annie Guthri's property in the back and all over with her neighbors going door to door. Annie Guthrie, not Nancy Guthrie, Annie Guthrie, where she had her dinner that night, but from whose house we are told by Annie and Tomas, she was returned, that she did not stay overnight there, that they brought her back home. That Tomas, according to the sheriff, brought her back home at 9:48 where the garage door went up, 9:50 it went down. So, you tell me why law enforcement was flooding the field around Annie Guthri's home last night.

4:50 I've said it before. I've done a lot of roll back warrants on locations. I have never ever even heard of anyone going back four or five times. I believe this is the fifth time last night. It it's got to do with new information coming in. And the good sign, the good part of this of them going back there is they obviously are receiving more information that they feel is actionable. And you have to, you know, we have to look into it. It keeps pointing back in the same direction. Now, the fact that we detained the wrong person last night and the fact that they let him go quickly is a good sign. They had a number of data points. He didn't he didn't fit in. He is a driver. We have spoken from the very beginning that it was someone that was associated with the house or um or crossed paths with Nancy in some way, shape or form. and this person on his phone delivered a package probably short period of time before this event

5:49 occurred and so he's in the crosshairs. However, I I think the other offenders did not bring their phones or we would have we would know who they are by now. They didn't have their phones in their cars. So, we don't know who was exactly in the area roaming around, you know, cuz sometimes a person may not have the phone on their on their pock in their pocket around their person, but they may have it in their car. No, their phones were left at home, whoever did this, or they were secreted in in in another more interesting way. similar to the Brown shooter. I think with the Brown shooter and also with um uh Coberger, people learned a lot because of all the coverage and because of all the intense um scrutiny of how are things done, how can you avoid this? He was stupid because he did this. These people pay attention to this and they watch this and they feel they've learned from it and they all think they're smarter than

6:42 everyone else and they're not. But the fact that they keep going back to the same location every single time. These are oftentimes a conspiracy uh kidnappings of three people, two, three people as a general rule. And I believe um we can ask uh Fitz and um Mary if that's what they believe. But I all the ones we've worked, they've been like three people involved. So this person could have just been one of the people they thought might have been involved, but it hasn't. So the refocusing has begun and it's intense and I don't think that that was the only person they had uh that they were looking at.

7:20 Well, if if No, it's not because cash said persons of interest and he's not a dope. He wouldn't have used the plural if he didn't mean it. But Mar Ellen, what you know, if you said to me there's been a school shooting and and I know nothing about who did it and you asked me for the profile, the likely profile of the shooter. I mean, these days I'd say it's it's somebody. It's a male pretending to be a female on some sort of drugs. I mean, there's just like been such an elevating elevation of people claiming to be trans doing the shootings. But it's either that, I'd say, or it's a white male between the ages of 19 and 26, who's a loner, who's been going to the shooting range, who's probably done some violent sketches or social media, um, who'd spend a lot of time gaming potentially. I mean we know like it is possible even for somebody like me who's not skil as skilled as you are to come up with a profile but what you say who

8:15 who kidnaps an 84 year old woman in the dead of night and now you actually have the blessing of a picture of him doing part of the crime. What does that profile look like? Well, when you're talking about cases um of the shootings from the time of Coline, which was um 1999, we've had really thousands of shootings. That's a lot of data where we can now comfortably say um this is the kind of person that we're looking at. This is these are the pre-offense behaviors. But when it comes to kidnappings, especially like this, and all three of us have worked these kinds of cases or cases involving kidnappings that were part of like a serial murder investigation, this case itself is an outlier.

9:06 So, it's very difficult to say, well, based on all the other cases um similar to this, um this is probably what we're looking at. And that's always been the challenge when you're trying to develop sort of a um you know a profile of an individual because these just are extremely rare cases. And so I think as as Jim um and Maren were both pointing out, you go back and you take a look at how the crime was constructed and how the offender accessed the victim. And um Jim and I used to sit around in um the conference room at Quantico and one of the first things that we did we would look at victimology. We didn't have that those numbers of cases to go back and say nine times out of 10 what was it? So we would have to go back and look at for example the victimology. It's the first thing that we looked at. Is this a high or lowrisisk victim?

9:59 Is this a victim uh where the crime scene was very low risk? And Nancy is a very low risk victim. She didn't live a criminal lifestyle and she was victimized in her own home which was in a nice neighborhood with with people around her. So we're we're basically starting from scratch to identify what we think will information that will tell us something um about this offender and then those videos last night were insight into the offender. So we add that to the profile as well. Um but again going back and saying this is what the data says, this is what the research says, we really don't have that because these cases fortunately don't occur that often. So we're we're back to really building almost an original profile.

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11:40 peace of mind regardless of the uncertainty. Text MK to 989898. Do you guys think that they can do the FBI? because I've heard two different experts now, former FBI both on the issue of facial rec recognition, notwithstanding the fact that he has a mask on. And one guy said, we ran it on AM update. Absolutely. It can still be done even though he's got the mask on. And then there was another guy who gave an interview to Ashley Banfield saying, I don't think so. Not Not with that mask on. It's going to be too difficult. The facial recognition does does depend on angles and things like that. And the iris, too. And you can see this guy's irises sort of, but they're reflected with light, so you can't really see them. Um, do you have any idea, any of you, whether the FBI's facial recogn recognition technology is likely to to produce out some names?

12:33 They're working on it right now. I have no doubt. And they're contacting different software companies who have AI capabilities, and they're doing their best with that. uh long before I was on the unib Force 1987. The biggest break in that case at that point um eight nine years old from the first bombing was the you know now iconic composite sketch of the uni bomber and that's all they had for evidence. He went dark for then six years after that then came back uh in uh in 93 started bombing again and writing to the New York Times etc. So that was a big deal. Then of course AI didn't even exist. Uh facial recognition software didn't exist. But that composite really went nowhere. You can ask yourself, you can look at Ted Kazinski eventually arrested in the composite. Maybe, maybe not. He even wrote in his journal. He put wads of gum like in his cheeks and all to make himself look a little bit

13:23 heftier. At least his face. And of course the hoodie and the hair had to get combed down. So and I'm not suggesting the person in this video,

13:31 he was brilliant though. Ted was brilliant. This guy, this guy, which with the vegetation, he's not brilliant.

13:36 Yeah, I'm I'm not comparing the two on levels of brilliance. Kazinski got away with it for 17 years. This guy's up to about 10 days so far, give or take. So, uh, and this video uh, being released was was a mistake on his part. Whether he had information, there was no subscription, so he was safe. Although he's still trying to hide the camera with these darn flowers, whatever the hell that means, then eventually takes it off. He may have had inside information from somewhere that with no subscription, there will never be any video. This surprised him like it did most of us yesterday in real time. I was getting surprised, Megan, as you were putting these uh these pictures out and then we, you know, analyze them according. So, this definitely altered his behavior and I'll let the other folks hear, you know, about the AI facial uh recognition software. It's it's out there and there's probably

14:23 people claiming they can do something with it. They're gonna come up with maybe 10 or 12 different, we'll call them composits of what this guy looks like under the mask. And maybe one of them

14:33 like you can you can see sort of what he looks like. Like let's put the pictures back on on the board. I what I see is somebody with a very round head, like a super round head. Um maybe we can get like more of the the full shot of him. Um he's got large eyes. They don't look hooded to me, you know, like a bunch of age has set in or like an Asian ethnicity. They look pretty open, his eyes. He's got what appear to be pronounced eyebrows. Some people have focused on how they almost look like women's eyebrows, like overly plucked, but that could also be just his face mask and the way it's making them look.

15:11 So, I'm not sure about the eyebrows. Um, he also seems to have stick out ears. Um, if you see like the the more the the side shot, his ears, some people's, if I put that thing over my head, my ear, you wouldn't even see my ears. They're my ears are pretty flat to my head. But his aren't. So, that's interesting to me. He definitely has or at least wore fake facial hair or it's real facial hair. But I mean, I imagine he wasn't banking on getting seen on camera. But in any event, he appears to have a mustache and either a sole patch or actual facial hair down below. And again, as we said yesterday, he appears to be like kind of stocky, not not skinny, that's for sure.

15:54 And either white or Hispanic, I think that's my guess. I don't know, Marine. I feel like there's a fair amount there to go off.

16:00 There is so much information there. And I agree with you 100% on the eyebrows. This is a this is a guy who probably without this um um baklava or or ski cap, you would say he had beautiful dark eyes and just eyebrows that that frame his his eyes nicely. Um it's the stitching around and pardon me while I look at this photo I have on my phone so I can blow it up a little more. Yeah. But if you look at the um the eye openings on this mask, it's got about a quarter in quarter inch stitch all the way around. And the reason his eyebrows look as if they're beautifully groomed is because that stitching cuts off all the top where where his eyebrows would be relative unruly. And you know, it only shows just that perfect arc, so to speak. He does have large eyes, but the close-up photo of his face that you see where you can see the lips and the upper um the mustache or the hair on his on his face, those lips are very very

17:04 distinctive. If if if most of us were doing any type of work where we're handling something, you know, most of us like make some kind of a face or something. Look at how calm he is. He's about to break into an 84 year old woman's home and he's sauntering around like he works there.

17:24 He's just as calm as he is so calm. It's very telling because I swear it's like as is this like his job because he's approaching it like I've done this many times. Oh, the Nest camera. I'll try to cover it up or maybe I won't. I don't know. I've got my backpack with, you know, I've got my gun on me. Some tool was used against. could have just been fists against his 84year-old victim inside. But man, he's like, "This is I I have more energy sitting down to this desk to do the show every day than this guy appeared to have."

17:58 Thanks so much for watching. If you like what you just saw, hit the subscribe button for more clips and full episodes.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "What the Nancy Guthrie Abductor Would Be Doing NOW as Images and Video From Nest Camera Released"?

Megyn Kelly (Guest), Fitz (Guest), Maren (Guest), Jim (Guest).

What is "What the Nancy Guthrie Abductor Would Be Doing NOW as Images and Video From Nest Camera Released" about?

The discussion focuses on the psychological evaluation of an abductor, analyzing behaviors captured through a doorbell camera. Experts express caution in diagnosing the individual as a sociopath but point to indications of potential mental instability, such as narcissism and a mission-oriented mindset, while noting significant behavioral changes observed in the aftermath of the alleged crime.

What is mentioned in this Megyn Kelly episode?

9 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Nancy Guthrie, Annie Guthrie, FBI, Richard Jewell, Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "What the Nancy Guthrie Abductor Would Be Doing NOW as Images and Video From Nest Camera Released"?

The episode runs 18 min; the transcript is about 3,444 words in 29 timestamped sections.

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