What To Know
- Retired investigator Lisa Miller said that unique grammatical quirks in the Nancy Guthrie ransom notes could help identify a suspect.
- She highlighted the repeated comma splices and open compounds as things to look out for.
- Nancy has been missing since February 1 when she is believed to have been abducted from her Tucson home.
A retired Colorado investigator has said that repeated grammatical quirks and sentence structure in the ransom notes sent in the Nancy Guthrie case could hold the key to identifying a suspect.
Lisa Miller spoke to Fox News Digital about the two letters that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department released to the public last month. The first note demanded millions in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin for the return of Nancy, while the second note claimed that Nancy had “perished” and was “buried in nature.”
Nancy, the 84-year-old mother of Today’s Savannah Guthrie, went missing on February 1, when police believe she was abducted from her home in Tucson, Arizona. Investigators have released doorbell camera footage of a masked suspect and sent DNA for testing at the FBI lab in Quantico, but no suspects have been named publicly.
Miller said the notes could give the public something to watch for, explaining, “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. 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.”
She noted that the comma splices (where two sentences are joined by a comma rather than separated by a period) are repeated throughout both notes. “We see it also again in the second note,” Miller 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 [is] one author.”
“These are characteristics, these are things that law enforcement can use to ask people, crowdsource for help in this case,” Miller continued, explaining that the notes also contain frequent open compounds.
“We see ‘heart related,’ that should be hyphenated by most people when they write that,” she stated. “We see ‘smartwatch’ written as two words. Most people write that as one. ‘Floodlight,’ we see that written as two words. So that is a continuity that we’re seeing between the two.”
Miller also doesn’t believe AI was used to write the letters because there are typos. “There’s something else, it’s called idiolect,” she explained. “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.”
She speculated that the sender’s idiolect could be why they used the word “perished” instead of “died” and used the phrase “buried in nature.”
“Perhaps this idiolect, this personalized language, is something that they’ve said based on religious upbringing, based on books they’ve read,” Miller noted. “Maybe ‘buried in nature’ is something they utilize.”
However, the specific language could also be the author distancing themselves from the death. “They blame others,” Miller said. “They blame, you know, the victim themselves. They distance themselves from that bad thing that they did.”
Miller also said to pay attention to how dates and times are written in the notes, plus other quirks such as the use of both a dollar sign and “USD” when writing about the ransom amount.
“I would bring people from the public that are looking at these notes to look at that also, because that’s a distinction,” she said.