Brian Fitzgibbons

Yeah, and there was something notably missing from this alleged ransom note, and that is a proof of life, right?

For this ransom note to hold any weight, the author of the note would have to provide some kind of proof of life that they did have Nancy Guthrie in custody and that she was alive and well for that note to have any value.

Absolutely necessary, right?

Because that's the key to this whole thing.

If this is a kidnap for ransom case, they will want to make it very clear to the Guthrie family that Nancy is alive and well.

Prior to them sending any type of ransom money, they would obviously demand that.

So, you know, that being absent from this ransom note really stuck out to me because, you know, you're not going to risk communicating too many times without providing it and potentially exposing your identity.

Knee-jerk reaction to this, Nancy, is that this is either a hoaxster who's trying to make a quick dollar off of this horrible scenario, or second, if it is actually tied to the case, that there's some kind of distraction taking place, that they're looking to tie up resources of law enforcement.

You know, what we learned recently is that this Bitcoin account associated with the ransom note is indeed an authentic account.

Now, when it comes to tracking the ownership of that account, that is certainly going to be a more difficult task.

This could be a lot more complicated than that, Nancy.

It's going to be possible, but Bitcoin inherently has certain amounts of privacy, a lot more than a standard bank account or an IP address would have.

So you would have to assume that, again, if this is an authentic ransom demand,

that the author of that ransom note has gone to great lengths to secure that Bitcoin account that could not be traced back to him.

And that is certainly possible.

That is correct.

So you're not going to have an individual's name and street address associated with it like you would, you know, if they said, you know, wire money to this routing number in this checking account number.

You know, that would be easily traced and verified.

Yeah, I think that there's probably some touch DNA from the inside that they're looking to analyze.

And with now the FBI announcing that they're jointly on this case, the ability to process these things much faster is going to come into play.