TMZ has told a mystery man who claims to know where Nancy Guthrie is that he can pass along information to them if he does not wish to go through law enforcement.
An anonymous tipster has now written TMZ a total of four times, claiming he knows where the abducted grandmother is being held and hinting that she may have been taken to Mexico by multiple captors.
The emailer is demanding payment in Bitcoin to reveal her location, as he supposedly does not trust law enforcement. The email’s author says he fears a decade-old burglary arrest may cause investigators to view him as a suspect, TMZ reports.
TMZ has responded to his latest correspondence by guaranteeing it will pass along any info he shares about the missing 84-year-old to the FBI, which is handling reward payments.
“I don’t know if you’re real or not, if you’re watching this, but if you are—and I have told the FBI that we’re going to do this, they know this—that if you’re worried about getting this money, and you really do have this information, send it to us,” the show’s executive producer Harvey Levin pleaded with the man on Monday morning.
Levin continued, “You’re sending us these letters—send [her whereabouts] to us. We will forward it to the FBI, and that way, there’s a record that you supplied this information. If they find her, and they find the kidnapper, then at least there is evidence, because we have it that you’re the one who provided the information. So this is a way for you to get that money.”
Levin said all four of the notes include the same Bitcoin address. They have made eerie claims about where Today host Savannah Guthrie’s mother is being held.
“I know what I saw 5 days ago south of the border, and I was told to shut up, so I know who he is, and that was definitely Nancy with them,” the latest letter received by TMZ reads.
The third letter also said that investigators should be “prepared to go international.”
Guthrie’s home in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood north of Tucson, Arizona, is about 75 miles from the southern border with Mexico.
New developments in the case have trickled in since Guthrie was taken from her home in the middle of the night on February 1.
President Donald Trump has gone as far as promising the death penalty for her abductors, telling the New York Post on Monday they would face “very, very severe, the most severe,” consequences.
The latest to emerge out of Arizona is that the FBI has matched a glove found two miles from Guthrie’s home—where she lived alone—to the masked individual who arrived at her $1 million house in the dead of night, ripped out her Nest doorbell camera, and then abducted her.
Guthrie was last seen alive on Saturday, Jan. 31, when she had dinner with her daughter, Annie, and her son-in-law, Tomasso Cioni. A report by independent journalist Ashleigh Banfield claimed that Cioni was being probed as the “prime” suspect in the abduction, but Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said Monday that Guthrie’s three children and their spouses have been cleared of any wrongdoing by investigators.
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