What Kind of Person Would Kidnap an 84-Year-Old Woman?

Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on February 1 in a kidnapping that has left her family heartbroken and the nation aghast. Almost one month after Guthrie’s kidnapping, little remains publicly known about the offender (or offenders) who abducted the 84-year-old woman. The Guthrie family has been cleared of involvement, and Savannah and her two siblings, Annie and Camron, have made numerous entreaties to the kidnapper for their beloved mother’s safe return. Eliminating even the least likely persons of interest is helpful, of course, but law-enforcement agencies have not publicly disclosed a suspect in the kidnapping.

While we don’t know what is happening behind closed doors with this investigation, public information about the suspect is limited to door-camera footage showing a masked, armed individual at her home. The FBI, which released this footage, provided a physical description of Guthrie’s alleged kidnapper that could apply to millions of people: The suspect appears to be a man between five-foot-nine and five-foot-ten. Authorities found DNA at Nancy’s home that isn’t hers and discovered several gloves about two miles from her house.

As with any high-profile crime, Guthrie’s disappearance has already mobilized armchair detectives and murder-board types, especially on TikTok, to come up with all manner of theories about who would commit such a crime. To cut through the growing noise, Vulture spoke with law-enforcement experts, including a retired FBI profiler — because seriously, what kind of person kidnaps Savannah Guthrie’s mom?

During retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole’s work in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, the first thing investigators would do is create a “study of the victim.” O’Toole said that kidnappings of older people are “very rare” — meaning there is little empirical evidence to work with in terms of characterizing a suspect.

Guthrie would be considered a “low risk” victim: She didn’t have a lifestyle that made her more susceptible to becoming a violent-crime victim. It also doesn’t appear that Guthrie experienced a random event that would up her chances of victimization, like breaking down on the highway. “What that says about the offender: The offender had to go to Nancy,” O’Toole says. “He had to go into her neighborhood, up to her porch, into her home,” which is the very definition of targeting. “He had to target her. So then the question becomes: Why was she targeted?”

“He came to her. And when you have somebody that goes into the victim’s home — a low-risk home, low-risk environment, to commit a violent crime like that and be successful at it — that suggests there had to be some kind of recon of the home and the area, so that he could affect the kidnapping and get away with it,” says O’Toole, now the director of George Mason University’s forensic-science program. This means he more than likely had to visit Guthrie’s property beforehand and could have even been there for legitimate purposes, such as construction work.

“It wasn’t just showing up one night at one o’clock in the morning and just saying, ‘Geez, I’m not sure how I can get in the house.’ That very likely did not happen,” O’Toole says.

O’Toole says “it’s not likely” this would be the kidnapper’s first time committing a violent crime in someone else’s home. The kidnapper’s clothing — which succeeded in hiding him — can also provide some insight. “Those items of clothing were specifically selected. They weren’t just random pieces that he grabbed on the way out. They all had a purpose to them,” O’Toole says. He might have done some sort of twisted fit check in front of a mirror before the kidnapping to make sure the clothes completely obscured his identity.

A person could walk into a convenience store to rob money and encounter an uncooperative clerk, changing the state of play. “Your original motive was to get in and out, get that $10 bill, but now you’ve got somebody that doesn’t want to give you the money, and so now your motive is to shut them up,” O’Toole says. With the understanding that motives shift, there are a few possible reasons behind the abduction, some likelier than others.  O’Toole explained that money-motivated kidnappings are less common than in the past. “They’re almost doomed from the start, because you have to inject yourself back into the investigation to get the money,” she says.

“Then you have motives like the person wants the notoriety of being in the public eye. The person wants the thrill and excitement of committing a crime like this — going into somebody’s house at one o’clock in the morning and grabbing them. The person wants a lot of attention and would take, if they were aware of it, the mom of a very famous journalist,” she says.

Misplaced aggrievement, O’Toole says, is “another motive that I’ve seen a lot of over the last 25 years, which I didn’t see before then: There are people who will commit crimes now because they blame society, they blame other people, they blame people that don’t even have anything to do with their lives for their life’s problems.” O’Toole calls them “injustice collectors.”

“There’s just not enough information and data to say,” O’Toole says. However, kidnapping “requires predatory behavior” — watching the victim so you can attack them. “When I see that kind of predatory behavior, that correlates with the personality disorder we do know as psychopathy.” To be 100 percent clear, O’Toole is not calling this person a psychopath and says she does not know. “He was ready to commit a very violent crime, and he’s very relaxed,” she says. “That kind of calm — I look at that, the lack of anxiety and fear that almost everybody else would experience; they don’t.” The apparent “lack of empathy” right before committing a heinous crime “is also another trait consistent with psychopathy,” O’Toole says. 

“You have to be prepared that those emotional pleas from a family — the tears, the strain in their voices that you can hear and so forth — are not going to be appealing to somebody that is very cold blooded and without empathy,” O’Toole says. But in this case, the family’s call for help is “really important” because someone close to the offender, such as a parent or sibling or spouse, might have empathy. “They’re not like he is, and that’s who they’re appealing to.” So how do you appeal to a person who lacks empathy? O’Toole says a kidnapper without empathy is going to focus on themselves, not the victim. If authorities are dealing with someone who has psychopathic traits, getting them to do something, such as return a victim, is almost transactional. “The negotiations have to be all about whatever that offender wants,” she says.

Dr. Tyron Pope, a retired New York Police Department sergeant supervisor in the detective squad and assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, points to the importance of looking at what we know. “From a behavioral standpoint, what we can try to discuss is the patterns and how we apply them — but we can’t be premature to come out with any type of lead that can lead to any misinformation,” he says. “You asked, ‘What kind of person commits a kidnapping?’ And I’m trying to figure it out myself, and simply, especially, What kind of person commits a kidnapping of an elder? There is no real single profile of a person that would kidnap an elder. What matters more is what the act is trying to accomplish itself.”

“Behavior provides insight. It basically helps us look into cases like this, where the greatest risk isn’t what we don’t know — it’s what we assume before the facts are established. The most important thing in a case like this is to rely on verified information, to avoid any type of speculation,” Pope says. “We’ve got to look at the kidnappers, what kind of mistakes they probably made. That comes with time, pressure, communication, commitment, so we can create some type of exposure to bring the kidnappers out, and that type of control leads to certain confirmation of vulnerabilities.”

Turns out, the kidnapper could totally be an affable family man who’s a  church pastor on weekends à la John Lithgow’s Dexter character. “Those factors can exist in somebody who, when they close the front door to their home, beats up on their kids and their wife and cheats and is very violent,” O’Toole says. “All of those trappings can be there. It’s what goes on behind closed doors that never gets reported that becomes important.”

O’Toole says the planning of this crime “cannot be emphasized enough” in trying to understand the kidnapper: “When you’re planning something, you’re thinking about this very violent behavior that you’re going to inflict on another human being.” A person planning in advance, O’Toole says, has time to consider, “What am I thinking? I’m a family man. I have kids; I have a spouse; I have all these things. Why would I do this?”

The kidnapping wasn’t reactive violence, such as throwing a punch in a bar fight. It was a “very cold-blooded” type of violence that involves preying on people, including strangers. “When you have the ability, capability of being like that, you are probably not a warm and loving person in your noncriminal life,” O’Toole says. There could be illegal behavior in their background, such as domestic violence and other rarely reported types of violence, but that doesn’t necessarily narrow down the search. “It doesn’t mean that we’re looking for someone that has a long rap sheet. It could be, but I doubt it, because I think the FBI probably would have found them by then.”

Marlon Marrache, a retired LAPD internal-affairs sergeant and public-information officer, cautioned against reading too much into the ransom notes at this point, voicing skepticism that actual notes would be sent to TMZ. At least one note in circulation was found to be fake, per the BBC. “We don’t know what those ransom notes are about,” Marrache says, and “there is no way to authenticate” the author.

At any rate, Marrache says, the notes don’t appear to have helped the investigation. “I don’t think it gives anybody any leads as to who the suspect is,” he says. “We still haven’t had any type of major lead to go and apprehend the suspect, nor the most important goal of this entire incident — to make sure that Mrs. Guthrie makes it home safe.”