Writing patterns in Nancy Guthrie ransom notes could identify US suspect
A series of messages, possibly sent by someone with information about the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie from her Arizona home, reveal important clues about the perpetrator, according to Lisa Miller, a retired Colorado investigator. She indicated that grammatical and sentence patterns suggest that both notes were written by the same person, which could finally generate the tip detectives are waiting for.
Nancy Guthrie, 84, is the mother of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie. Authorities said she was taken from her home in Tucson, northern Arizona, in the early hours of February 1, 2026, after a masked intruder was recorded on a doorbell camera at her door.
Making tickets public in July 2026 could go beyond just refreshing someone’s memory, Miller said. The measure can also put pressure on the author of the messages, leading to an error that exposes him to people close to him.
“Criminals can’t help but look over their shoulder and wonder, ‘Are they following me? Are they coming?’ And that pressure creates behavioral leaks that we’re looking for and that people around them can notice,” Miller said.
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However, the tickets themselves can offer the public specific elements to identify the author.
“Think about if you heard someone in your group, maybe outside your circle, meet you and use this strange language, or if you received a letter,” Miller said. She added, “If you see something in writing or in an email where they’re using these comma splices, those are the helpful things to ask people to look for.”
“Comma splices,” where two sentences are connected by a comma instead of a period, are a striking detail in both messages, the investigator added.
“We see this again in the second note,” he explained. “So there is continuity between the two notes, which is one of the reasons I believe this uniformity, more likely than not, indicates a single author.”
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department released the notes in July 2026, six months after the alleged kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie from her Tucson, Arizona, residence. His whereabouts remain unknown, and authorities said they hope someone can identify the sender’s “unique linguistic style.”
“These are characteristics, they are things that police can use to ask people, to seek collaborative help in this case,” Miller said.
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Comma junctions, however, are not the only writing habits that caught the expert’s attention.
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“We are also seeing some open compounds in the notes,” she said. “We see ‘heart related,’ which most people would write with a hyphen. We see ‘smartwatch’ written as two words, when most people write it as one. ‘Floodlight’ is also written as separate words. That’s a continuity we see between the two notes.”
The expert also expressed her belief that the sender did not use artificial intelligence to create the messages. She cited a typo and the lack of fluidity characteristic of AI-generated texts as evidence.
Instead, unusual language may mirror the author’s unique speaking and writing habits, Miller noted.
“There’s something else, it’s called idiolect,” Miller clarified. “Idiolect is our personal style of communication and can be influenced by many things: the region we grew up in, the neighborhoods we live in, the slang we adopt.”
The sender’s idiolect may explain why he used the word “perished” instead of “died” and wrote that Guthrie had been “buried in the wild,” Miller surmised.
“Maybe this idiolect, this personalized language, is something they said out of a religious upbringing, in books they read; maybe ‘buried in nature’ is something they use,” she said.
Another possibility raised by Miller is that criminals often try to minimize the seriousness of their actions.
“They blame others,” Miller said. “They blame, you know, the victim themselves. They distance themselves from that bad thing they did.”
Miller also pointed out the use of both the dollar symbol and the acronym “USD” to indicate the ransom amount, in addition to the way dates and times were written, as other relevant peculiarities.
