Ex-FBI Special Agent Tells CNN Why He Thinks Nancy Guthrie Disappearance May Not Be ‘Kidnapping’

Former FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano told CNN’s Pamela Brown that he’s not convinced the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie is attributable to a traditional kidnapping during a Monday morning interview.

Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on February 1, and authorities have cited evidence found at the elder Guthrie’s home as reason why they’re treating the case as a likely kidnapping case.

During their conversation on Monday, Gagliano explained to Brown why he’s not sure about the theory:

BROWN: The first plea from the Guthrie family, it stressed the urgency of releasing her, their 84-year-old mother. As we know, has serious health issues, desperately needs her medications. We’re now in day nine of her presumably not having those meds. There was no mention of that in this new video. What did you make of that?

GAGLIANO: Yeah, well, you mentioned it. So we have an octogenarian, a woman who’s 84 years old. She obviously has heart conditions, needs medications. And Pam, I’ll give you a stat here. Do you know the percentage of kidnappings that occur of 80-year-olds? It’s like infinitesimal. It’s less than one half of 1%. That’s why this case, again, is so baffling and confounding.

BROWN: And are you convinced it’s a kidnapping?

GAGLIANO: Am I convinced that this was an actual kidnapping?

BROWN: Like an abduction, like they took her-

GAGLIANO: No, and I’ll give you this-, yeah, and I’ll tell you this: there are numbers of ways to conduct kidnappings, right? There’s a new craze of this, and again, we saw this south of the border when I was stationed there called virtual kidnappings where they do everything they can to make you believe that they have your loved one in their quote, unquote “possession” when they don’t. And they’re acting quickly, they’re utilizing AI now, artificial intelligence, to help, you know, cause this fog of vagaries so that the families are panicked and do what they need to do. It’s just, there’s so many questions here and the fact that the kidnappers, if this was a kidnapping, had a 14-hour head start from the time she was dropped off at home, supposedly at 10 o’clock, until the family notified law enforcement sometime around noon the next day, and you see the flurry of law enforcement efforts back and forth. I don’t think there’s anything to be taken from that. People are reading too much into that. That’s the normal progression in an investigation where one lead might trick off another lead, and you move from one thing to the other. And lastly, two things are gonna solve this case: one is good detective work that’s flat footwork, knocking on doors, talking to people, canvassing, interviewing people. And the second piece of this, and the biggest one, is the digital imagery, the digital exhaust that investigators are going through right now from the kidnappers’, quote unquote, “kidnappers'” ransom note. From the door ring bell that was removed, but they might still be able to harvest some forensic evidence there. Things like that are probably gonna solve this case, and we all hope and pray it’s gonna have a good conclusion.

Watch above via CNN.

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