Two ransom notes tied to the suspected kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie, contain repeated grammatical quirks that could help investigators identify the person who wrote them, according to retired Colorado investigator Lisa Miller, who spoke with Fox News Digital.
Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home in northern Tucson, Arizona, in the early hours of February 1, after doorbell camera footage recovered by authorities showed a masked intruder approaching her front steps. The Pima County Sheriff's Department released two ransom notes to the public in July, roughly six months after her suspected abduction, in hopes that someone would recognize the sender's writing style. Her whereabouts remain unknown.
According to Yahoo, the first note demanded millions of dollars in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in exchange for Nancy's return, while the second note claimed she had "perished" and was "buried in nature." Fox News reported that the combined rewards offered in the case now exceed $1.2 million.
Miller told Fox News Digital that making the notes public was intended to do more than jog someone's memory. She said it could also pressure whoever wrote them into making a mistake that exposes them to people in their own lives.
"The bad guys can't help but look over their shoulder and wonder, are they onto me? Are they coming?" Miller said. "That pressure creates behavioral leakage that we're looking for, and people around them might see it."
The Comma Splices And Open Compounds
Miller pointed to comma splices, where two complete sentences are joined by a comma instead of being separated by a period, as a signature detail appearing in both notes. "We see it also again in the second note," she said. "So it's continuous between the two notes, which is one of the reasons why I believe this continuity more likely than not indicates this one author."
She also flagged a pattern of open compounds, or words that most people would either hyphenate or combine into one word but that appear split apart in the notes. Examples she cited include "heart related," which she said most writers would hyphenate, along with "smartwatch" and "floodlight," both written as two separate words rather than one. Miller said this pattern repeats across both notes, reinforcing her belief that a single author wrote them.
She suggested that members of the public compare these habits to writing samples from people in their own lives. "Think about if you've heard someone in your group, maybe outside your orbit that you just encounter that uses this strange language, or if you've written a letter," Miller said. "If you see something in their writing or in an email where they're using these comma splicings, those are the things that are useful to ask people to look for."
Why Investigators Doubt AI Wrote The Notes
Miller said she does not believe artificial intelligence was used to generate the messages, pointing to a typo in the text and a sentence flow that lacks the smoothness typically produced by AI writing tools. Instead, she attributed the notes' unusual phrasing to what she called the writer's "idiolect," or personal style of communication.
"Idiolect is our personal style of communication, and it can be affected by many things: the region we grew up in, neighborhoods we live in, slang that we've adopted," Miller explained.
She speculated that idiolect could explain why the writer chose the word "perished" instead of "died," and described Nancy Guthrie as having been "buried in nature" rather than using more conventional language. "Perhaps this idiolect, this personalized language, is something that they've said based on religious upbringing, based on books they've read," Miller said. "Maybe 'buried in nature' is something they utilize."
Miller also raised a second possible explanation rooted in offender psychology: that the phrasing reflects an attempt to minimize the crime. "They blame others," she said. "They blame, you know, the victim themselves. They distance themselves from that bad thing that they did."
Other Details Investigators Want The Public To Notice
Beyond the comma splices and compound words, Miller said she would encourage members of the public examining the notes to pay attention to how the ransom amount was written. The sender used both a dollar sign and the abbreviation "USD" when specifying the sum demanded, a redundancy Miller described as a notable distinction. She said the specific way dates and times were formatted in the notes is also worth close attention.
"These are characteristics, these are things that law enforcement can use to ask people, crowdsource for help in this case," Miller said.
Authorities have not confirmed that the notes are authentic, and Fox News reported that investigators have not ruled them out either. Savannah Guthrie has said publicly that she believes the notes may be genuine. Yahoo reported that investigators have also sent DNA evidence recovered during the case to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, for testing, though no suspect has been named.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department has continued to seek tips from the public in the months since Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. Anyone with information related to the case is asked to call 1-800-CALL-FBI, or, for those wishing to remain anonymous, 520-88-CRIME, according to Fox News.
Miller's analysis centers on the idea that written language carries identifiable fingerprints, even when an author tries to obscure their intent. The recurring comma splices, the unhyphenated compound words, and the specific vocabulary choices in the two notes form a pattern that, if matched against writing samples from someone in the public, could give investigators the lead they have been seeking since Nancy Guthrie's disappearance seven months ago. For now, the case remains open, the ransom notes remain unverified, and the 84-year-old mother of two national television hosts remains missing.
