FBI Shares Suspect Details; Reward Rises to $100K (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The FBI has given the first official description of the suspect that they're looking for captured on the doorbell camera at Guthrie's home.

[00:00:08] Speaker 2: With us now, retired FBI hostage negotiator Chip Massey and CNN law enforcement contributor Steve Moore. And Chip, I want to start with you. With this new FBI posting, this is sort of a new tool in the investigation. They put out this notice and they have doubled the reward to $100,000 from $50,000. What does that tell you? In your experience, what kind of a difference can that make?

[00:00:30] Speaker 3: Well, if anybody is motivated by money and people that might be associated with this kind of individual is definitely going to be motivated by money because this is the kind of thing that will, if people are on the fence doubling something, it's going to make a difference.

[00:00:45] Speaker 2: In your experience, it does matter?

[00:00:46] Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely.

[00:00:47] Speaker 2: All right. So another piece of information that we're getting from this, Steve, is the description of the suspect, a male, 5'9 to 5'10 with an average build. And then a discussion of the backpack, the Ozark trail hiker backpack. How important are details like this to get out into the public?

[00:01:08] Speaker 4: It's very important. Somebody might not realize that the person that they know could be a suspect until they happen upon that backpack. It could be kind of a serious, serious discovery for someone. And that backpack is extremely important in tracking the possible purchaser through debit cards, credit cards, things like that.

[00:01:34] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:01:34] Speaker 2: This is a picture of the backpack that we have right here, Chris. You can see the backpack in the doorbell camera footage. You can see the backpack and what it looks like as it's sold in the store. Some other images here. I imagine a pretty common backpack.

[00:01:48] Speaker 3: So what do you do with this information? Well, what this really helps us do again is that it puts it in front of the public eye. It's always going to be the American people that come to the rescue in this kind of thing. So now they have a shape, they have a design, they have a brand. Somebody is going to tie that together to the person that they know. And when they see those videos together of him at that doorway and when he turns his back, again, backpack, person, movement, gate. And now we have a height. It just gets really tight for these people.

[00:02:20] Speaker 2: Is combining really this, the idea of the backpack and putting it together with this other piece of information. Hey, wait a second here. I know a guy about this tall who walks like this, who has that backpack.

[00:02:31] Speaker 3: Exactly. We saw a lot in that video where he's turning around. He's moving around. He's getting that foliage up. And when we see that backpack and we see those mannerisms, the gate, the kind of things he does when he's indecisive, somebody is going to recognize that.

[00:02:48] Speaker 2: So Steve, one other bit of information now that officials are asking for. They're saying that everyone who lives within a two mile radius of Nancy Guthrie's home, they want them to go through whatever security footage they have for an entire month. Basically the entire month of January. Nancy Guthrie went missing the night of January 31st into February 1st. You know, I'm looking at this map here and I see a lot of dots there. Each one of those is a house. How much information is that likely to produce and how easy or hard will it be to go through that all?

[00:03:20] Speaker 4: It's going to produce a lot, hopefully. And yeah, it's going to produce so much, it will astound you. It is extremely tedious to go through that type of film. However, that area where the crime occurred, that's not a thoroughfare. People don't go through there on their way to somewhere else. So any vehicles that are in that area that cannot be traced back to a home or a homeowner in that area, you can just drill down right on that and start finding vehicles that don't belong there. And you're going to find somebody possibly casing well before the abduction.

[00:04:03] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great point here. As you look at this, the only sort of semi-large road going through it is right there. All the other roads are very residential, they're not the type of place you would go under any circumstances, really, like not even if Waze took you off course by mistake. So Chris, I've spoken to you before. As we talk about the individual who may have Nancy Guthrie in custody now, and all these new pieces of information that are going public, and this individual watching it all go public with the reward and with everything else, what are they thinking now as they're watching this investigation?

[00:04:38] Speaker 3: Oh, that's the thing, right? Is that there is so much more pressure now that's on them, right? These captors, they didn't expect that there would be, you know, this many eyes on them. They were just looking for, okay, listen, I've got this task to do, and this is what I'm going to do. This is going to be my payday. Now everything is changed for them. Now the focus is entirely on them. When they see these billboards, when they see these alerts go up on the TV, right? Everything narrows down, and they've got millions of eyeballs on them now.

[00:05:11] Speaker 2: All right, Chris Massey, great to see you. Thank you very much for your help on this. Steve Moore, thanks to you as well.

[00:05:16] Speaker 1: They say the person is male, 5'9 to 5'10 with an average build, and he was wearing a black Ozark Trail hiker backpack, a brand sold by Walmart. The FBI also adds that it has received more than 13,000 tips in this case. The reward, as John mentioned, has doubled to $100,000. Showing you images from Guthrie's home right here. This is from yesterday, and you see that white tent. Investigators set that white tent up at the entry, a source saying that it was part of what they were trying to do was to recreate the nighttime conditions that they had the night that she was abducted, using clothing and a backpack similar to the suspect's to conduct tests to try to gather more information and clues. CNN's Ed Lavendera live on the scene in Tucson this morning. Ed, what's the latest?

[00:06:14] Speaker 5: Well, good morning. Investigators here still believe that these video images and still images from that front door camera is ultimately what's going to help them find Nancy Guthrie. As you mentioned, the investigators have received more than 13,000 tips, and one of the reasons that the specific information in this simulation was done there at the door was to give people a little bit more clarity to improve the quality tips. I know from talking to various people here in Tucson, with 13,000 tips, you can imagine that many, many of them are really just not good quality tips and not helpful, so they're hoping that more specific guidelines, like the height, 5'9", 5'10", male, the specific brand of the backpack, and all those kinds of things will help narrow down the tips that come in because they believe that somebody out there recognizes who this person might be and can phone that tip in. So a lot of that work continues, and at the same time that that's happening, they're also kind of going back out through the area here and expanding their call for video and hoping that residents will do that as well. So they're asking for video from January 1st to February 2nd within a two-mile radius of this home. So I imagine the manpower it will take to go through all of that video if so much of it starts pouring in. And then there's a few specific dates that investigators are also interested in as well. We've learned from around January 11th, which is about three weeks before Nancy Guthrie was abducted, from like 9 p.m. to midnight, and also in some early morning hours on Saturday before she was abducted. So talking to residents here for almost two weeks now, they feel a great sense of ownership and a sense of obligation to help and do whatever they can to help bring Nancy Guthrie home.

[00:08:06] Speaker 1: Ed, thank you so much for being there. I really appreciate it.