Ex-FBI Suspects Nancy Guthrie ‘Coughed Up’ Blood as Kidnappers ‘Carried Her Out’ of Her House
Nancy Guthrie has been missing for over two months, and yet the details about what happened to her have been scarce. Police have released surveillance video and photos, but no suspect has been identified, and no motive has been disclosed. So far, we know that law enforcement believes she was taken from her house by force by a masked assailant sometime between the night of January 31 and the early hours of February 1.
But what else do we know? Retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente told NewsNation’s Brian Entin that images of the blood found on Nancy’s front porch show that drops seemed to have been smeared. According to Clemente, his analysis of the video of the scene leads him to some conclusions.
Related: Who are Savannah Guthrie’s siblings?
“This tells me a number of things, and it’s very specific. One is that … at this point, Nancy’s face was very close to the ground, within a foot of the ground. This could be she was either on her knees, hunched over, or actually lying on the ground,” he said.
Clemente went on to expand on the droplets, “Medium velocity (blood spatter) can be created when somebody actually aspirates blood and then coughs it up,” he said. “You can see three circular blood spots, but they are hollow. You see mainly the rings. This definitely came from her (Guthrie). She coughed it out. It kind of went out in different directions.”
“Where that blood pattern disappears, I believe she was likely picked up and carried the rest of the way, perhaps with her face up so that there was no more blood deposited on that walkway.”
The retired FBI profiler also believes Guthrie was kidnapped by just one person. “If there were two people, you would think one of them would have control of her, complete control of her inside the house and brought her outside and would not have lost that control,” he stated. “But here, she’s clearly on the ground coughing this blood up.”
“There’s no evidence to me that there are more than one offender here. If there was three different shoe print patterns in the blood stains … that would tell me something. I don’t see it. I’m not aware of that evidence.”
Clemente even speculated on motive, saying about the suspect, “Here it appears that that goal had to do with getting Nancy out of her home in the middle of the night,” he explained. “I do believe his motivation was strong enough that he carried this out even despite the fact that at some point she did not actually cooperate.”
Reports have indicated before that police don’t believe the suspect had much criminal experience, and Clemente agrees. “There are things that he thought he did that were sophisticated, but they were not criminally sophisticated,” he said.
We still don’t know the motive for Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping, but Clemente believes that if some of the ransom notes were real, as Savannah Guthrie indicated she and her family believed, then the motive was clearly money. “In order to get that money, he would have to control her, take her, threaten her life,” Clemente added. “The fact is clearly that actually didn’t happen in these circumstances.”
Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer recently wrote on X that she believed the motive was money. Police “said they know the motive for the abduction of Nancy and they have known it from the beginning,” she wrote, adding, “Kidnapping for Ransom. Nancy sadly died. The kidnappers didn’t care and tortured the family with 2 notes knowing the FBI would not recommend paying a ransom without proof of life. Like most cases, this one is simple, but everyone wants to make it complex.”
