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A veteran criminal profiler says ransom demands allegedly linked to Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance appear to be genuine, telling Fox News Digital that the notes read like they were written by two different people – a cold-blooded “psychopath” and someone “emotional”.
“The bottom line is, I don’t believe they’re real,” said gangster producer John Kelly in an interview. “The first note is about the dollars, about the rands….Now when you go into the second note, you’re talking about a different kind of personality than me.”
There was no sense of urgency in the kidnapping — a masked man with a gun — and the early-morning home invasion that snatched Guthrie from her bed and left blood on her doorstep, Kelly said.
“A lot of these guys are still mentally active, and they’re going to do that, wake an elderly woman up in her bed and drag her out like that and she’s bleeding all over the place…they’re just going to want to get out of trouble as fast as possible,” Kelly said. “They won’t mind leaving their condolences.”
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An armed man is seen tampering with a doorbell camera on Nancy Guthrie’s front door the morning of her disappearance in Tucson, Ariz., on Feb. 1, 2026. An undated photo shows Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie. (Provided by FBI; Courtesy of NBC)
Excerpts from the original note included a demand for Bitcoin for millions of dollars, gave a deadline for payment and allegedly included details of a crime scene that was not widely known at the time it was sent to local media. It did not include proof of life.
Details about the second note – or at least versions of it sent to different news outlets – were made public this week.
It also includes allegations that Guthrie died unconscious after his abduction, a source close to the case told Fox News on Monday. And it said “he was buried with nature.”
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Aerial drone footage shows Nancy Guthrie’s home in Tucson, Ariz., on Feb. 3, 2026. Nancy Guthrie, the mother of ‘Today’ show host Savannah Guthrie, has been allegedly kidnapped from her home. (Fox Flight Team/Fox News)
“He’s not with us anymore, he didn’t mean to,” said Kelly. “Now I see a word that touches my heart: ‘on purpose.’
And that doesn’t fit the profile Kelly sees, he said.
“This is a person for me who will not know the feeling when he stumbles,” he told Fox News Digital.
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A separate photo shows a masked burglar at Nancy Guthrie’s home and blood found on her door the morning after she was believed to have been abducted from her home in the Catalina Foothills of Tucson, Arizona. (FBI, Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
When he took Guthrie, the captor or captors “opposed him,” Kelly said.
“That’s very different from what I see in the few words I’ve been able to see…in the ransom note that says it was not intentional and he’s buried with nature now,” Kelly explained. “That’s how he should comfort us after that terrible case of removing Nancy and emotionally torturing her by taking her out of that house.“
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Savannah Guthrie sat down with fellow “Today” show host Hoda Kotb to discuss her mother’s disappearance. (NBC/Today)
Authorities have not publicly confirmed or retracted the claims.
At first, they seemed to take them seriously, when Heith Janke, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Phoenix field office, sat down with Guthrie’s older children to videotape the response to the first note.
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Pima County deputies check a flyer taped to a mailbox outside Nancy Guthrie’s home in Tucson, Ariz., on Feb. 23, 2026. Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of fellow “Today” host Savannah Guthrie, is believed to have been abducted from her home in the early hours of Feb. (Michael Ruiz/Fox News Digital)
Guthrie’s daughter, 84-year-old “Today” co-star Savannah Guthrie, has also publicly said she believes at least two of the notes were genuine.
“There are many different notes, I think they came, and I think that most of them – my understanding – are not true, and I did not see them,” he told his colleague Hoda Kotb in an interview in March. “…But I believe that the two notes that we received, that we responded to, I tend to believe that those are real.”
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FBI agents and law enforcement officers conduct a door-to-door search of Nancy Guthrie’s home in Tucson, Ariz., on March 5, 2026. Guthrie has been missing since early February 2026. (Matthew Symons of Fox News Digital)
Kelly, a veteran profiler and psychologist who has interviewed a number of serial killers, said he believes the kidnapper is a “very cruel person” without remorse or guilt and may be a “psychopath.”
“I was looking at his eyes in the video that we would be able to see, I mean I wasn’t seeing the normal blinking that was going on. I wasn’t seeing anxiety,” Kelly said. “Psychopaths are like that – they can be as cool as cucumbers. They don’t feel much fear… They just go about their business.“
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Anyone with information on Guthrie’s case is asked to call 1-800-CALL-FBI. There is a combined reward of more than $1.2 million for information leading to the case.
Tips can be submitted anonymously to Tucson’s Crime Stoppers agent, 88-Crime, at 1-520-882-7463.
