Breaking: Location of Blood Inside Nancy Guthrie's Home Revealed | Nancy Guthrie Missing Update

Hey everybody, I'm Ashley Banfield, this is Drop Dead Serious. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you also for subscribing, I appreciate it. If you haven't already, this is the thing right there, the little guy and it's easy and it's fun and it's free and it's cute and it doesn't cost you a penny and then you're subscribed and I get you all the information you need and you never miss an episode. episode and if you're a member that's the join thing down there thank you as well for being a member I appreciate it I have a video coming up for you very

soon by the way so I have more information on day 52 of Nancy Guthrie having vanished and this investigation which feels very very stalled but I've been talking to multiple sources folks and I have a little bit more information that I did not know before that changes a few things. I have been mystified by what happened inside the house. We know that this crime happened sometime likely between 1.47 a.m. and 2.28 a.m. on

February the 1st, Sunday. And as Sheriff Nanos explained, Nancy Guthrie had come home, put her garage door down and presumably went to bed, as we probably all would do around that time. So this perpetrator likely got her out of her bed because Savannah Guthrie said, my mother disappeared from her bed in the dark of night. So I've been wondering, was there a struggle? Was there something that happened in the bedroom?

Was there a struggle out in the family room? Was there a struggle out in the front hall? The kitchen? Where did this crime take place, however long this scumbag was in her home. Filthy scumbag infiltrating this innocent woman's home. Where did the crimes happen? Like what happened in the home? And I have come to learn, I think you probably, if you follow me regularly, and thank you, that my source told me

on day three that there was blood found inside the home. Second source of mine confirmed definitely blood inside the home. That second source went further and told me that the deputies who'd arrived, who thought they were looking for a missing woman, just maybe she'd wandered, an elderly woman didn't show up for her church event and her family has called us. When the more skilled investigators arrived, they saw evidence that indicated they needed to call in a more skilled and experienced team like the homicide investigators,

right? They saw, according to my source, the back door was wide open. My first source had told me that, that the back door was wide open. My second source told me back doors wide open. My episode source told me back door's wide open. My episode yesterday, if you haven't seen it, told you which door we think it may have been, based on many data points that I have sort of amassed, and that she regularly left her back doors, plural, unlocked.

There's a back door that goes into like a storage unit or storage part or a shed part of the house that could be part of the garage but it doesn't look like it's part of the house proper and then there is a back door that is right smack dab kind of in the middle of the house that goes into the back patio and it is visible from the front door. If you come in the front door, you can kind of see that that back door out to the back

patio is right there, and if it's open, you can see it. And we were told there was blood in the house, but I could never find out where. Where did those investigators see it so that they knew there was something so dire that they had to bring in homicide investigators? And now I know. Now I know where the blood is inside the house.

And it is a fascinating piece of data because it is right in the front entrance of the home. Front entrance, front hallway, whatever you want to call that front entrance. We don't have a perfect photograph of the inside of Nancy Guthrie's front entrance. We have a good photograph of what's off to the left and it is a living room. As you look off to the left there's a nice living

room and a window behind you there and a fireplace and another window and a sliding glass door at the end. But if you're standing at the front entrance, you're looking to the left down the living room and you're looking pretty much straight ahead to the sort of family room area with a fireplace and a nice big long window out the back of the home and then off to the left of that, a door that is more than likely the door that the investigator saw open, because that's what you would see.

Could you also see the sliders open way down the left in the living room if those doors were left open? My source said back doors were routinely left open, not side sliders. There are two sliders that exist on the side of the house, right? You walk in the front door, look all the way down to the left, there's a sliding

glass door out to a little patio, and then there's another sliding glass door that goes into another room, presumably the master bedroom, maybe Nancy Guthrie's bedroom. And if you're confused at all between the difference between open and unlocked, let me explain. The investigators saw a door, a back door, wide open. That's the reporting I got. Not just unlocked, wide open. And the Guthrie kids told the police that Mrs. Guthrie routinely left her back doors unlocked.

So those are the difference between unlocked and wide open. As far as sliding glass doors go, they are towards the side of the house and I was told back door wide open and back doors plural routinely left unlocked. I don't know about the sliding glass doors on the side of the house way off to the left as you walk in the front door. I'm not sure if those were unlocked as well. Did this perpetrator get in through those? Maybe? Possibly? I don't know. But the blood now in the front entrance of the home is a

significant detail about this crime. just in the front entrance. Not in the bedroom, not in the kitchen, not in the living room, not in that family room. The front entrance has a pattern of blood that is the same as it is outside and it goes over the threshold out the door. So imagine if you will standing in the front entrance of someone's home and there's blood dripping and you're walking out the door and that blood dripping continues in the

same pattern out to now the front entrance outside the home and the pathway that goes down the front walk towards the driveway. First though, quick note for my sponsors, being on camera a lot means that having the right kind of makeup to keep my skin happy is very very important to me and I think it is to you as well because I have always hated it when makeup feels cakey and heavy but today's sponsor Jones Road Beauty oh they get it they just get it

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And after you purchase it, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. So do me a solid. Let them know DROPDEADSERIOUS sent you. And the link's just down there. that I've learned about from my sources, that the blood dripping pattern, which I had already learned was the same, I just didn't know where. I now know it is on the other side

of that front door inside the home. That's where that blood is. In the front entrance of Nancy Guthrie's home, if you were to walk through the front door and say hello, that's where the blood pattern is. And so I wondered, well then, what happened there?

You know, what happened? And I have reached out to somebody who is really good at this and a lot better than I am, Dr. Peter Valentin. And I'm so glad that he joined me on this because I really needed someone to sort of tell me not only about this new information about where the blood now is crossing over the threshold of that front door, but also the shape of all the blood drops and the verticalness of them.

And that thing that everybody thinks is an expiration pattern. And he's so much better at this than me and a whole bunch of folks on the internet because he's got other theories about that expiration-like stain. Don't get too caught up on it being an expiring kind of stain. He's an associate professor. He's got a long title, so I have to read it.

Sorry. Dr. Peter Valentin is an associate professor and a department chair of the forensic science at University of New Haven. He's testified in seven states. He's also testified in federal court as a blood stain, blood spatter expert. He's also a forensics expert, so not just blood pattern, but he's very, very good with

the blood patterns. And so I asked him a lot about what this new information tells us and also to give me his expertise on the blood pictures that we've seen outside. He's got a lot to say. Don't go anywhere. You have to hear this because it's not what I thought.

A lot of it is not what I thought. Like I've had to rejig my thinking about what might have happened to Mrs. Guthrie based on what Dr. Valentin has said. Also just a few things in the news today regarding you-know-who, Sheriff Nanos. He seems to make all the news, don't he? So he's given a new interview.

Not to us.

No.

Nope.

Those news conferences ended months ago and now he just cherry-picks. So this is a new interview that he's given with News 4 Tucson, and Fox News has released this. And he's defending his department's handling of the investigation. Look, he read a lot of his press because he knew exactly stuff that Brian Enten had reported. He went head to head with a lot of us, right? He knew a lot of stuff that I reported.

Boy, did he ever chew me out, not by name, but it was when I broke all that news on day three that he got real mad and actually took it out on his department too, who all said that he just tightened the noose around them as soon as I had reported from my sources. So he told News 4 Tucson that he has no regrets about decisions that he made early on, even as this case remains unsolved.

Can I quote him? Here we go. Look, I have no regrets about my team and their efforts. I don't regret we let the crime scene go too soon or any of that. Do what now? Because I distinctly remember, like on day, I don't know, 20 or maybe 14 or somewhere along the line, somebody asked you if you let the scene go too soon, sir. And this was your answer.

You know, Monday morning quarterback, I probably would have, but I'll say this. We processed the scene, we got what we thought was complete. My team did that. I have to have all the faith and trust in their abilities and their skills, and I think they went through that pretty well. But because another agency now steps in and wants to assist, we're just like with you, we're an open book.

Absolutely, how can we help? One of the things people don't see, I heard your question about, you know, and we left and then others could walk up. You know, when we process a scene and we're done, we return that scene to the, in this case,

the homeowners, the family. And we don't just go march back in there. We call the family again and get permissions to go back to the home. So yeah, there's, again, Monday morning quarterback, absolutely, I probably could have held off on that.

So you did have regrets. You did admit that you let the scene go too soon and said, mea culpa, that's on me, whatever. So now why are you saying, no regrets? Nope, I don't regret that we let the crime scene go too soon. Did you forget that you did regret it at one point? Like, what made you unregret it?

I don't know. OK. So then when asked, well, this was a good one. would say to the person or people behind Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. Sheriff Nanos decided to say this. It's like a direct appeal. You ready?

Quote, just give her up. Let her go. Take her to a clinic, a hospital. Drop her off. Just let her go.

End quote.

So I guess Sheriff Nanos believes that Mrs. Guthrie is still alive because it's just let her go, take her to a clinic, drop her off. Even Savannah Guthrie has issued a different tone, right? In her last statement she said, we just want her home so that we can give her a place of final rest. I'm paraphrasing, but effectively Savannah seemed to indicate that a place of final rest meant we want her home so we can celebrate a funeral of some kind or a memorial of some kind and so to hear Sheriff Nanos say this here's what I would say and listen what am I but

I've seen a few sheriffs do their thing and I would say motherfucker we are gonna find you you can run but you can't hide but we are going to find you. You can run, but you can't hide. But we are going to find you and we will tear you limb from limb, so to speak, in our system of jurisprudence in America. We will fuck with you when we find you. So yeah, live your life looking over your shoulder because we will find you and we will absolutely bring the full force of Pima County and Arizona and the federal government down on your sorry stinking ass.

That's the thing that I would say. Not please drop her off, let her go, take her to a clinic. And that's just me. But I'm not so sure that this is the thing that you want to say to the perp.

I don't think he's going to do it.

I don't know. Call me nuts. It's day 52. So then something else happened today, and that was that there was a hearing. Pima County Board of Supervisors held a meeting, and it's kind of like an airing of the grievances festivus for the rest of us, and a lot of people showed up.

There were some issues that are unrelated to Nancy Guthrie that certainly happened at this meeting, but also there were some people who had some things to say about Sheriff Nanos. There were official people who came and spoke their piece, get him the hell out of there, so to speak. There's a recall effort, and there were citizens as well. I want you to hear from some of the folks who stood up and said what they wanted to say about Sheriff Chris Nanos,

especially in light of the Nancy Guthrie investigation. Have a look.

Chris Nanos is an international embarrassment at this point. I know that you guys didn't hire him.

We elected him, unfortunately. I'm Sergeant Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Deputies Organization. As many know, a reporter recently uncovered the long-hidden, terrible record of Sheriff Chris Nanos from his time as an El Paso police officer. This includes purportedly beating a handcuffed suspect in the head with a flashlight for which he was suspended

and nearly indicted. This record, if properly disclosed, would have likely prevented him from being hired or for becoming a peace officer in the state of Arizona. For over 40 years of Arizona has been a place of great concern for the community.

The state of Arizona has prevented him from being hired or becoming a peace officer in the state of Arizona. For over 40 years, this has been concealed from the department and

the voters of Pima County. Because of this scandal, our organization, the largest union of deputies in Pima County, has or no confidence and a call for his resignation. The verdict was unanimous. No confidence. He has lost the faith of his deputies and the community. His past renders him unfit to wear the badge. That he has concealed it for 40 years does not make the concealment right. It makes the fraud of his deputies and the community. His past renders him unfit

to wear the badge. That he has concealed it for 40 years does not make the concealment right. It makes the fraud greater. The 300 deputies I represent speak with one voice. Chris Nanos must show the integrity he once swore to uphold. He must show the dignity that the office requires. He must resign. If he will not, then I ask this board charged with oversight to exercise every authority vested in you. The power of this board should be used, not for comfort, but for accountability.

There are moments in the life of a community when those entrusted with authority must stand firm against those who abuse it. This is such a moment. We ask that this board have the courage to support Supervisor Hines' item.

Pima County and the nation is watching. Thank you.

I'm here to ask that the entirety of this board support the measure to hold accountable, open an investigation, and to call to question by legal means in fact that Sheriff Nanos lied under oath in a sworn deposition about his previous work history and subsequent discipline thereof, which is misrepresentation of office. So there you have it. Don't know how the recall's going to go. It's going to be tricky. You need a lot of signatures.

But Board of Supervisors sure has a lot to process after today. So let me get you to the meat of the reporting that I got today, that my source has gotten. That is that the blood continues inside the house So let me get you to the meat of the reporting that I got today, that my source has gotten. That is that the blood continues inside the house at that front entrance, inside the front entrance, not just outside the front entrance of her home, over the threshold, over front door,

and into the front entrance of Nancy Guthrie's home, and what that story might tell us. But also what the blood drops that we can see, which both Michael Ruiz and Brian Enten, Michael Ruiz from Fox Digital and Brian Enten from News Nation were able to videotape with their own eyes, you know, I think 38, 48 hours after the crime scene was just let go, right? And actually crime scene was let go 30 hours or so after the disappearance. By the time that Brian Enten and Michael Ruiz were able to videotape, I think it was like Tuesday, so, you know, two to three days after Mrs. Guthrie disappeared and the crime scene

was released, the reporters were able to at least witness the blood pattern, the blood spatter pattern at the front door. But we don't see it inside the house. So I spoke to Dr. Peter Valentin, again, of the University of New Haven, who's an expert in blood spatter, about what the blood tells us that he can see and what the information tells us that my sources told us about the blood inside, and what it tells us about the

crime. And what he has to say is fascinating. Dr. Valentin, what do you make of, first of all, just the overarching information that we've learned? And that is that the blood droplet pattern that we've all seen outside Nancy's front door continues over the threshold and inside her front entrance. But that's it. That's it for blood spatter, for blood droplets, for blood evidence in this crime

scene.

So what's interesting about those blood droplets is that they're what we refer to in blood stain pattern analysis as drip stains. And drip stains are probably the most common stains that we see, and they are what they sound like. They are blood dropping from an object and landing on a surface and they have no energy associated with them. It's simply gravity pulling blood down and blood falling onto a surface. And notice I didn't say it means that

somebody's bleeding, although very often that is what's happening. What could be happening here is that, and we're all assuming that that is Nancy Guthrie's blood because otherwise...

No, we know that. Yeah. We do know that. The sheriff confirmed it's hers.

Okay, right, because otherwise we'd be doing forensic genetic genealogy on that unknown blood. But what it means is that an object, most likely Nancy Guthrie, is the source of blood outside the threshold, right, so outside the door. But where it stops can mean one of two or even more things. One is that she is put into a vehicle, it is she or somebody sees that she's bleeding and then stops it, right, puts a towel, puts a hand, does something to stop the bleeding. The other thing

it can be is that she is repositioned and the repositioning changes the blood flow? Well, that would be really critical

if we had a continuation, but we don't. My sources tell me that what you see is what you get, except for the stuff inside that I broke in this podcast, and that is that the blood droplets go down the outside entrance of Nancy's home and down the path and stop. No gap and then

restart. So it just seems logical that that's where a car could easily park and that that's where she could have been taken away. Yes and so now I was a

detective with the Connecticut State Police in addition to being a forensic scientist so here's where I get to combine those two skill sets. And so imagine what I just told you that you know we have the repositioning of the source of the blood right so we'll assume for a moment it's Nancy's maybe it's her chin maybe it's her arm wherever it happens to be and then you know along with that you have a waiting

vehicle, right? So the blood stops because there's a repositioning, and then why doesn't the pattern continue? Because she's put into a vehicle, which is certainly what makes sense given the location. Now, investigatively, you know, what do I want to do with that information? Of course, there's been a tremendous amount of investigative effort put into finding the vehicles that were in the location that night, and of course, as it should be. Now, what do I care about as a forensic scientist, a bloodstain pattern expert, and really, as

a forensic scientist trying to find traces of blood. There's blood in that vehicle. Even when you know that you're trying to clean an area to remove blood, it is exceedingly difficult because most people when they clean a place where they think blood is, they only clean until the color red is gone. But the chemical components of blood stay there. And we have a whole cache of reagents

that are called latent development reagents. And what they're specifically meant to do is help us find blood that we otherwise can't see. So in the event that a vehicle is recovered, that is believed to be the vehicle that transported Nancy from that house, the first thing that we'd be doing or should be doing is looking for that latent blood, because

I'd highly doubt that it would be visible at this point in time. Because it's a critical piece of information that puts that vehicle at the house at the time that she's bleeding, because blood doesn't stay liquid for very long.

And we so hope that we'll get there, but I mean, we're starting to feel as though we may not. We may not get to a vehicle. Let me just go back to the source of the bleeding, because this is what's new to this. This is new to me and I believe it's new to everybody. I haven't seen anybody else report it and my source gave me this information that the bleeding begins inside the house not outside the house. This is not something that happened at the door. The bleeding

didn't begin at the back at the front door outside. It began inside and I had imagined that anyway because a source had told me there was blood found inside. We just couldn't tell where. We know she was in her bed because Savannah has said she was taken from her bed in the dark of night. Those are her words. Taken from her bed in the dark of night. So you would assume then perhaps there'd be some kind of a struggle in the bedroom where she would see for the first time this intruder

But my source says that is not where blood is found blood is only found Inside the home at the front door inside that front hallway It's where the dripping begins and it continues over that threshold. So If you're that Connecticut state cop again, what are you imagining happened inside that house? Okay, so this

is great information and finding blood on the inside of the threshold doesn't mean she wasn't first attacked in the bedroom. I think everybody can remember a time that they were injured when it took some period of time for blood to accumulate for it to begin dripping. And a common mistake a lot of investigators make is they hyper focus on the place where they first see the blood and they think this is where the attack occurred. And that is is almost I wouldn't say it almost always incorrect

because in shooting scenes you can have the immediate production of blood where it does fall or you know you get spatter stains where they it memorializes where the shooting occurred but not even in shooting scenes all the time. You know, you can have somebody wearing a winter coat or a shirt and if that bullet enters and exits that person, what's first going to happen? The blood is going to soak into the clothing before it then begins to drip or then otherwise

present itself outside of that. So finding the blood in one room doesn't mean that that's the room where the attack occurred or the incident occurred. You have to go back and you need to look for other potential items or artifacts to give you indications of what might have happened. Now what you can do is you can look at the type of blood stains potentially and then look for other sources of evidence and put those two together to

say does the blood stains and the you know the artifacts within the space help me understand what happened and therefore are the blood stains suggestive of the event happening in the space I know I'm being a little cagey about what we have here

but I'm being a little cagey about what we have here. No, but I'm fascinated with, well, everything that you're saying. The droplets are vertical and they're undisturbed. And my source tells me that inside, as you go in through the front door and you now are standing in the front entrance of the home and the blood is there, they are identical. They are droplets that are undisturbed. There's no sign of struggle in them, there's no footprints in them.

They are just quite literally a trail of blood droplets that goes from the front hall over the threshold of the front door down that front walk and disappear. But I get very confused about how that could have happened if she were walking, say at gunpoint, because theoretically the gun would have to be behind her to be moving her along, not dragging her along from behind, right? Or carried.

But take your investigative lens and tell me what you think about an undisturbed trail of vertical blood droplets like that, and then we'll get to that one spot that doesn't look like a trail of vertical, it looks like an expiration zone. So start inside and then tell me what are the options here for an investigator to imagine how she was taken out of that home.

Okay, so I, boy, there's a few things there. We might need to slow this down because I actually do see some disturbance in the blood droplets outside the house. Okay. And what I see are called skeletonized droplets.

And so if you look at some of the droplets on the outside of the house, they look partially dried. So what you'll see are, it's essentially a perimeter stain, so you'll see the exterior of the circle and then you'll see an absence of blood in the middle of the circle. And what that means is that that blood droplet was on the surface long enough for the drying process

to begin and then something disturbed the droplet as it was drying.

Okay, I can explain that and here's the reason. I wish these were forensic pictures we're looking at. They're journalists' pictures and I don't know if the investigators got good forensic pictures. I assume they did because they knew they were there. But these are journalists who after the scene was released 30 hours or so later, and they may have gotten to it 48 hours, and walked up and seen it and started rolling video. So you can imagine those blood droplets have now been there for

at least 48 hours, and the journalists are walking.

So I'm going to make an assumption about what the temperature was at the time that those blood droplets were deposited. mid-70s, maybe 80 degrees?

Well, February 1st, 147 to 228 a.m. I'm going to assume closer to 228 a.m. because that's when her pacemaker separates from the Apple device. So 228 a.m. in Tucson, Arizona, February 1st.

Let's say even 60 degrees. I'm in Connecticut, so I'm jealous of the temperature no matter what it is in Tucson. That blood was not liquid more than 15 to 20 minutes. So it wouldn't have mattered when the journalist came to the now-released scene. Those blood droplets had already dried.

They couldn't have changed the appearance of those droplets unless they rehydrated them. And that would have been an obvious alteration. So a

skeleton...

Unlikely, by the way, rehydrating them highly unlikely because they were covered over. That's a covered entrance.

Exactly. So you know, I have to make that, you know, because I've testified, I have to make that, you know, because I've testified I have to make that, you know acknowledgement that I recognize that there is a way to do what I'm talking about, but it's so Unlikely that it's not an explanation for what it is that we're seeing But what we do tend to see in scenes is that recently deposited blood Can begin to dry and then the movements of our, you know, our source of

blood, our bleeding victim and or our perpetrator can disturb those stains and memorialize the activity. Now these drip stains, the ones that we're talking about, they don't tell us what happened, meaning like what's the injury, what's the, you know, what happened during the attack, what is the attack, what's the, what's the injury, what's the, you know, what happened during the attack, what is the attack, what's the injury of our victim, what they do for us investigatively is they tell us what's the movement post-event, post-injury. So in one sense they're not very helpful in kind of helping us understand the incident

itself, but where they do come in handy, if you will, is that they tell us who's going where, right? Who is the DNA profile and where is where are the stains located? So having Ms. Guthrie's DNA on the inside of the threshold and on the outside of the threshold tells us something that seems fairly obvious is that she's at the threshold of the house. But what's interesting is is that if she's at the inside of the threshold long enough for the blood

droplets to accumulate there and she's also at the outside of the threshold long enough for all those blood droplets to accumulate there, there's an inference that we can draw. And there's a phrase that I use when I write reports and I testify called, or I say, it's a not insignificant amount of time. And it's a period of time that's not momentary, but I don't know how long it is. But I know it's not insignificant.

Right?

She's there long enough for that blood to accumulate.

I'm glad you said that, because when I have an untrained eye and I saw it and I thought these are very vertical, they're not moving quickly and coming in on an angle, and there are enough of them that this is a slow moving event. And I have been told by my source that the blood inside is exactly the same pattern as the blood outside. So the slow-moving event started at least,

where the blood is concerned, in that hallway. And so, as the investigator, is this somebody who's struggling to carry her, or she's struggling to walk and is walking slowly? Like, you tell me.

So, what I can say about the stains on the outside, and it would be hard for me to offer a well-formed opinion because I would love to see the inside stains too. Wouldn't we all. Yeah it's like are they a continuation or are they two separate patterns? But what I can say about the outside stains is that there's one photograph, there's probably more than one, but there's one that I paid a lot of attention to that essentially shows droplets falling in the same place and you're getting this

like secondary spatter and you see a lot of smaller droplets in the same area and so we tend to see those when you have the source of blood in the same location for again a not insignificant period of time. So if the blood is in the same place where it's essentially dripping into itself, you get these tiny droplets that come from the now accumulating pool of blood on that surface. So you get these tiny droplets, you know, appearing around the edge of this now expanding

pool. And I say pool because that's what we call it a pool pattern, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's large. But if you go back to that photograph you'll see that around some of those drip stains there's a slightly larger stain that has tiny droplets around it, tiny spatter stains. And what that is, again preliminary opinion by looking at these photographs quickly, is that that's blood falling into an accumulation of blood that's already on the surface. So she's standing there for a period of time? I would say, I can't say she's standing, but I can say the source of blood, which I think

will say, based on the volume, is not an object with her blood on it, but it's her, is stationary. Is she standing? I can't tell you because I don't know where the injury is.

I'm glad you, by the way, let me just stop you there, because I'm glad you just mentioned that. I'm glad you, by the way, let me just stop you there because I'm glad you just mentioned that it's not an object with Nancy's blood on it. I hadn't contemplated that, but you do have to contemplate that if someone uses a weapon and is carrying the weapon out of the house. This is absolutely, in your opinion, and you tell me if I'm wrong here, this is absolutely

not the pattern of an object with Nancy's blood on it? I would say given the volume that we're seeing here and given, again I haven't seen the photographs of the pattern inside, given that there's two patterns, one outside, one inside, it's highly unlikely that it's from an object because the pattern that comes from an object with somebody's blood decreases over time. There's a limit to how much blood you can have on an object. And so as a function of time, the distance between droplets increases because there simply isn't enough blood or there isn't

more blood to continue dropping. So if a person is walking with an object that has blood on it, the distance between those droplets as the person continues to walk

increases. Now that makes perfect sense. But so from what, again you're having to look at the journalist's pictures not the CSI photographs that you'd prefer, but you're seeing that that Nancy was in a position for quite some time. This wasn't a slow-moving event out that front door?

I would say she was stopped at that threshold for again a not insignificant amount of time. Is that 30 seconds? Is that two minutes? I can't say but something's going on at that threshold long enough for that source of blood to create that pattern that I just described where there were you had those satellite spatter stains. And you know now the question is well what's the

activity? You know in particular when you think that she's being restrained in some way, whether or not she's standing and somebody's restraining her or whether she's being carried or whatever the thought is, what's happening in that moment while she's being restrained and those blood droplets are landing on that surface. Now what you also can say is that there has to be a clear path from the source of the blood to the surface. So if, you know, by way of example, if we believe that the blood is coming from her nose and her mouth,

well then, there must be a clear path from her face to the ground. Right, so it can't be then dripping onto her clothing, it can't be hitting her pants.

Or her legs, as she maybe is walking. It does. And by the way, to me it looks as though this is a clear vertical path without a lot of dynamic movement.

Yes, so the fact that the stains are circular tells you that the source is directly overhead. Because as the source changes its orientation and it no longer is directly overhead, the shape of the droplets change. So we generally don't need to do this with drip stains, but in other situations you can actually estimate where the blood's coming from based on the shape of the stains. And in this situation, because we recognize them as drip stains

and an overall drip pattern, we wouldn't need to do that. But in other situations, the angle of the droplets is critical for us.

And these don't look like they have angle.

No, they don't. They're generally circular.

Which means it's a slow moving event because you can't continue the movement without some kind of an angle.

Yes, you know, there's definitely, the spacing of the droplets is generally what tells me something about, you know, the speed of the event or the speed of the movement. It's two things, right, because there's also a rate of blood flow, right, How much is the person bleeding? That can also contribute to the spacing of the droplets. So you can see this quickly becomes a pretty complex, you know, situation as you're trying to process all of these, not only the appearance of the blood stains, but

what do the characteristics of those blood stains mean in terms of investigative possibilities, in terms of investigative possibilities, in terms of potential for injuries, and where blood might be found later.

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like, and this is common parlance, but an expiration of some blood. That's what it looks like. It looks like a cough. What do you see when you see that particular spot that isn't a nice clear drop?

So, the satellite droplets that I mentioned as being potentially the blood falling into liquid blood could be confused for an expiration or an expirated pattern. Now, the way to distinguish between these is that expirated blood tends to mix with saliva and mucus, right, because it's coming from either our nose or our mouth.

And had somebody been at the scene that either was a bloodstain pattern analyst or knew enough about BPA to have somebody consult and look at these stains, that blood could have been tested for the presence of amylase, which is the enzyme that is in our saliva

that helps us digest starch. And that would allow us to distinguish blood coming from this area from other blood sources on our body. And that helps us understand something about the dynamics if we recognize where the blood is coming from.

I can understand that, but I also just sort of see amidst all these direct vertical drops, there's this what looks like a spray. How else could you get a misting of blood but for expiring?

Well, I don't see enough detail in that photograph that I could necessarily infer that it's a spray. So, there is a pattern that we call a projection, right, where you have blood accumulating in generally in your mouth and you could project it or, and this is not what I see here at all, you have a breach of a major vessel and you project a large volume of blood and that's not what we have here at all. So

the idea that blood is being sprayed onto the surface is really inconsistent with everything else that we see. Really? That I'm seeing from the photograph. And not coughed? It could be. Again I don't see enough in that photograph to say that looks like a cough, but if it were, if it looked like it when I was actually looking at a better quality photograph, the easy way, first off, the other thing that you could do just from the photograph is there's a dilution of

the blood because again it's mixing with saliva. The other thing that you tend to see is that because there's a like a tackiness to saliva and mucus, when blood is mixed with saliva and mucus, little droplets tend to stick together and cluster together, so the way that the blood behaves changes

in a way that you can recognize in the resultant droplets. And I didn't really see that in the photographs that we had. I just saw satellite spatter. But again, you know, if what we needed to do was really interpret, hey, is there a difference between these two patterns and does it have value for us to interpret them, you know, you would take a photograph and really zoom in and see, are there differences between

these two? So, for satellite, sorry to interrupt, but for the satellite spatter, don't you need a source that is your direct source that sprays out to the satellite spatter? Because it doesn't look like it in that one misty blood pattern.

So your source of blood actually is the blood droplets of blood on the ground and then you have a fifth droplet Hit those four droplets that are already there it creates its own spatter

Okay, and if you see and you see that is a possibility in that particular spot because to me I would have thought you'd need a concentration in the middle to even have the the satellite spatter from another blood drop

Yes, and you don't need a lot. Okay. Yeah, so I think if anybody in your audience has ever had a leaky faucet and if you have one or two droplets of water land in your faucet and that third droplet hits, you see water droplets from the water that's already accumulated in the sink and it's the same concept. And-

Is that what you see there? Like you don't see it as a cough or an expiration. You see it as blood droplets that hit other blood droplets and cause that spray?

I'd say between the two options, the one that seems more plausible to me is the satellite spatter. But I'm an evidence-based analyst. And so if I look at that and the stains look diluted and there's artifacts to suggest that you have blood mixed with saliva and

or mucus then I'm thinking it's an expiration pattern.

Can I ask you because my theory and it's based on you know just my work as a journalist and certainly not having any evidence that CSI investigators have collected, let's put it that way, is that she was carried out and that he had her over his shoulder and that she may have been bleeding behind him and leaving that pattern behind him, that he's not stepping in and nor is she. But that when he struggles to get through that big heavy door,

and maybe there's some time that it takes him to get those doors open and those doors closed, and he's turning around with her, is it possible he may have moved and shifted so that her diaphragm, which might have been over his shoulder, would have gone, huh, and that might have been that source of that blood. I think

it's as plausible as anything else I've heard up to this point. The one part of it that I think is valuable is that it gives us a reason to think that Ms. Guthrie's blood would be on the clothing of the perpetrator, right, and most importantly on their back. And in a lot of cases when people don't think to look at their back as a potential source of blood stains, they always worry about what's on the front of them. You know, they look at the front of their pants, the front of their shoes, the front of

their shirt, and they don't ever think about the back, especially in situations where they're using objects. And, um... Well, let's hope.

I mean, again, this is down the road. If we catch the guy and we can go through his closet and we can find something on the back of a jacket that looks like he was wearing, or did he change clothes that were in the backpack, we don't know. But can I ask you also just the height of the blood droplets? I mean, it would seem to me that if you're dropping

blood droplets from somebody who's over your shoulder, that's, you know, a solid four feet that feels like it wouldn't drop in a nice, beautiful, round spot. It would spray completely out. What's your thought about the height

of where those droplets came from?

So there is a there's a relationship between how far blood falls and the size of the stains. So if we were to drop blood from you know a few inches off the ground it makes a very nice neat, you know smaller droplet the higher we go, the bigger the droplet gets. But there is a limit to how big that droplet gets because there's also a limit to how big a droplet can be

in terms of volume. The droplet can only be so big because surface tension holds it together. And there's a limit to that surface tension. But blood can only go as fast as its terminal velocity. You know, much like a skydiver

can only go so fast towards the earth. So once we get to blood's terminal velocity, which is about three feet off the ground, it doesn't matter how much higher they were above that, there's no difference in how those bloodstains look. But Ashley, what's just as important in assessing how blood looks when it's hitting something is what are the characteristics of the surface? Is it

smooth? Is it textured? Is it porous? And so, you know, these are ceramic tiles and you know, they might look smooth to us when we're looking at them on a photograph, but there's probably a texture to them, you know, if we were to touch them, that actually disturbs the blood as it's trying to make a neat circle. And so you'll actually get some satellite droplets potentially from that but what you'll also get is you get like an irregular border So it won't actually look like a neat circle

You know, it'll look like is you know how kids draw the Sun? You know with the little beams coming off the edge so you get what we call like scalloped edges, so you'll see a bit of that but you know, you don't want to mistake that for anything other than what it is but it's just a you know it's a it's a

surface to the surface yeah yeah well I hadn't thought of that but it makes perfect sense I also wanted to ask you how much you know about the difference between somebody who's my age and I'm 58, the way I bleed and the way my skin, how tough it is to get me to bleed compared to someone who's 84 on blood thinners. Do you look at your science differently

based on the person who's bleeding or is blood, blood matter what?

So the idea that somebody might be on a blood thinner doesn't mean that the viscosity of somebody's blood changes. It's more in reference to how their blood behaves, I'll say chemically, for lack of a better way of describing it. So it doesn't manifest any differently in the way that it appears at a scene.

So I don't really need to consider it. Now, there are some disease processes that will have a marked appearance, or a marked difference in how blood appears at a scene. This is not one of them. So if she was on blood thinners,

or if somebody has high cholesterol, there is no appreciable difference in how the blood stains appear, and I don't need to take that into consideration when interpreting them. And the normal variation in the viscosity of human blood is something that always sort of

factors into the variance. Like I don't calculate angles to you know three significant figures you know there's always a very sort of wide range that I'm working with so even if we calculate angles when we're looking at angles of impact the only way that I'll describe them is was the person standing were they at some you know lower height that was not standing or were they you know near the ground we won't say oh they were two or were they near the ground. We won't say, oh, they were two feet seven inches off the ground. So there's an appreciation for all the variables that could

exist here and we don't get too specific. And that's the key to staying within the limits of

our science. Do you see that those blood spots came from three feet and below or above three feet? Could you tell based on just again the journalists' photographs?

I wouldn't want to speculate based on the journalists' photographs alone. I would say this, Ashley, if I had to form an opinion about that very issue, I would actually want to conduct some experiments and draw on that tile on that tile. And that would be the best way to form a scientifically derived opinion.

Do you think, Dr. Valentin, that that might have been what they were doing when they put that white tent up for, you know, half a day or a couple of hours, at least out in front of her front door, I think two or three weeks into this crime, that suddenly they might have been doing those kinds of experiments under that tent?

Yeah. Somehow I doubt they were doing that part. If I had to speculate, I would imagine that they were using other reagents, maybe an alternate light source, and they were looking for latent evidence, right? Evidence that they hadn't found during their first pass through the scene. Because you only find the evidence, I know this is going to sound very simplistic and cliche, but you only find the evidence you're looking for and

if you go to your scene with the wrong sense of what your scene is about, you could walk right past the evidence of what actually happened. And in the days and weeks since this happened, has their understanding of this event changed? Right? And if it had, and now they're aware of a new bit of information, right? Would that have made them go back to the scene to look for something that they had no idea was relevant the first time they were there?

Well, when that tent came down, guess what was missing? The bracket for the camera that was her doorbell camera, her Nest doorbell cam. It had been up for three weeks and suddenly they decided it was worth taking down. And I kept saying, well, if this guy's putting a bite light in his mouth, well, there's DNA all over those gloved fingers and then he's messing around with that Nest cam and the bracket. So I was astounded that

it wasn't taken earlier, but it ended up being taken. Yeah, I can't believe that that wasn't seized the first time either. And I mean, you could say, well, we didn't know what was on the video immediately.

Still. You knew he took the camera.

But you also had the blood evidence right outside the threshold. And so you should have immediately just looked around the threshold to say, well, what's small enough that I can take this with me and bring it back to a laboratory where I can examine it? Take evidence with you that turns out to have no probative value. What did you just spend? Man hours.

You spent some time looking at it and it turned out not to have probative value. You wasted nothing.

What's your opinion of them leaving that half moon welcome mat right there? I think it's still there. Honestly, I don't know. I haven't seen a picture recently, but my God, that half moon welcome mat was there for weeks.

It's the same thing. To me, that would be a treasure absolute nightmare for a trace evidence analyst to shake that out over their bench and get tens of thousands of pieces of sand and, you know, detritus from the environment? Absolutely. But within that, might there have been one or two, three, could there have been a carpet

fiber from the vehicle that the perpetrator drove to the house?

Or his mud from his home on the bottom of his shoe.

Exactly.

Yeah, no, I was very frustrated. And again, I'm not a CSI expert. I'm just a little crime reporter. But I've seen enough of this stuff that I have noticed that that is usually very valuable. I couldn't understand why it wasn't. I want to just pull on one more thread before I leave it, because we went on a little bit of a tangent,

worthwhile tangent, and that was the nature of Mrs. Guthrie's injuries. When you see those blood droplets, and knowing what my sources said about the continuation over the threshold and inside the front entrance of that house. Is that a grave injury? Is that a, you know, somebody grabbed her too hard on

the arm and you know, when your skin at 84 is so fine and you are on blood thinners, you can easily cause a bleeding injury just by holding somebody too tightly. Is it a punch? What is it that you think it could be?

Yeah, that's, see, that's a difficult one. So this is not something I would write in a report or testify about. But I would say, investigatively, if we were in the command post and we were talking about next steps, I don't think this is a lethal injury. I don't necessarily think that if she hasn't shown up in an emergency room that you know but she's not she's not surviving this right because sometimes that's the issue right we have scenes where we can recognize that this is a catastrophic injury and

that if the person does not show up in an emergency room, we're dealing with a different kind of case. This isn't that. However, she does need medical attention of some sort. Do we want to go to the drugstores and see who's buying gauze and hydrogen peroxide? There's all sorts of ways that you can take this.

Clearly, it's survivable.

But what are we combining it with? What else happened that I don't have physical evidence of?

Right. Exactly.

The other question is, and I think it's always hard to ask these questions because we've all hoped that Mrs. Guthrie would be found alive. Even Savannah is intimating that she wants her mother home for a final resting place at this point. So there's a lot of reality that's coming, you know, into focus. There's still optimism. The sheriff certainly seems optimistic. He wants the perpetrator to drop her off somewhere. I'm not sure where that comes from.

But is that the kind of bleeding that comes from a dead person or a live person?

So I would not have a way of distinguishing between those two, at least not from what I've seen in these photographs. And I share your feelings about all of this. It's so frustrating and my heart goes out to the Guthrie family and the simultaneous national coverage of their mother's disappearance, but at the same time, perhaps even needing this coverage

to keep the spotlight on this case. Because I remember working cases that had no coverage, that I didn't understand why. And cases that had international coverage, and I didn't understand why. In cases that had international coverage, and I didn't understand why. So I can appreciate the double-edged sword here.

And given what I saw, you would not be able to distinguish whether or not the person was still alive or not. But perhaps there are other aspects of this that we're not privy to that might, that potentially could change my opinion on that, but certainly not based on the photographs, I can't say

anything. If Mrs. Guthrie was killed inside the home and this perpetrator removed her body and left that pattern behind, inside and outside, over that front threshold. What kind of a circumstance would cause that kind of a blood pattern because we don't bleed after we die?

Well, it's not that we don't bleed after we die, it's the matter of there's nothing creating pressure in the way that we would if we were still alive. I can create a source of blood in somebody who's dead if I simply reposition the body so that the injury is below, you know, lower than the rest of the body so that you have this passive pressure for lack of a better description. Gravity. Exactly. So you could

imagine if you had somebody on a stretcher and their arm was hanging off the side of the stretcher, that that could create it. And so, you'd have scenarios like that. But aside from that, I mean, it is suggestive, but there's just not enough there to, you know, so here I have to exercise some restraint and say, you know, scientifically I have no way of distinguishing between the two, but investigatively what would I say

if I saw that? I say it tends to lean in the direction of her being alive.

And then the other question I'm going to ask you, and this is a really hard one too, more on your Connecticut cop hat here, because you have to noodle all the possibilities, all the theories, all the scenarios, in order to move along in an investigation. Knowing what you know about this crime scene, knowing about this blood pattern going from inside the house,

over the front door, and to the outside of the house, and being the same all the way, and knowing what we've seen on the front door bell cam and that my source says the back door was left wide open, what would your theory be about what happened to Mrs. Guthrie?

I don't know enough to say what happened in the house. I mean your guess is as good as my guess is as good as anybody else's. And I'm a person that is really driven by physical evidence and physical evidence tells a story. And let me let me explain it this way. When you open up the door to Nancy Guthrie's house, that

house tells a story. How does she keep her house? Like what level of order is her house normally? And what would draw my attention is what are the alterations to So if you tend to be a person who keeps your house neat, where are the disruptions?

Where are the disturbances to that otherwise neat state? Now that's not to say that you weren't attacked in the place that still looks neat, but I'm drawn to the changes to the status quo, right? Most people will say, you know, signs of a struggle. But I guarantee there are people listening to this,

the whole house looks like a sign of a struggle. That's how they live their day.

Now, my kids' bedrooms, yes.

Exactly. That's what I usually joke around because I, you know, I'm here at a university and, you know, most dorm rooms look like a sign of a struggle all the time. So, you know, we can't really look at things that simplistically, right? You're looking for a change to the normal state. So I would have to look at that house and let myself get drawn to what looks, I'm not going to say out of place because that's not really the way to think about this, but what looks recently changed, right? That she didn't have a chance to bring it back to the

normal state. But I can't let myself get drawn to that without first walking through and looking at everything in a methodical way. It would be like reading a book and skipping a page 276. I wouldn't have any sense of who the characters were. So I will understand what's out of place once I digest the entire scene. Then I become really well versed in what is the normal state for that house. And it's only when I do that that I can really sense where in that house are the areas

that I now need to focus on. Because I work with physical evidence. So you could swab that house and get a thousand exhibits and they're all useless because you didn't apply the right frame of reference for how you're going to do this. I could do it that way and find three places there that clearly look like something happened here based off subtle cues and find 20 swabs and those potentially are more probative. And in a lot of cases people will walk in, whether it's ego, whether it's to be

right first, people will rush to figure out what happened instead of hanging back and letting a scene like that essentially talk to you, right, by soaking it in, working a scene methodically, and then letting that drive the process. Do you think that happened here? that have had this level of scrutiny, the pressure of multiple agencies having to cooperate, the pressure of the media, and now exacerbate all of that by the pressure of, you know, a famous family being involved, it creates unforced errors. And errors always complicate things.

Yeah, but the sheriff is saying that he doesn't regret anything. He doesn't think he made any errors. He doesn't think that he returned the scene too early, even though I think in week two or three he admitted that he had done that. I'm not 100 percent sure why he's saying these things, but in your estimation, do you think that the investigative, you know, teams let that house tell them the story, or do you think they told the story too quickly?

I feel very confident in saying that they, well, first they let the house go too quickly. Unless the Guthrie family was beyond adamant that they wanted the house back and I can't imagine why I would have held that house for as long as I possibly could, particularly because this is one of those very few cases where forensic evidence is leading the investigation. In most situations, we conduct our investigation and forensic evidence is

running in parallel or forensically what we're doing is we are confirming what we're figuring out investigatively, right? We're almost like a lagging indicator of what you figure out investigatively. This is one of the very few cases where everyone's waiting with bated breath to know what the forensic testing results are so that we can figure out what to do. And this you know this only happens in maybe five and ten percent of the cases I ever worked where

everybody wanted to know what I had to say about what to do because if the forensic testing doesn't give us useful information we're stuck. And that doesn't give us useful information. We're stuck. And that doesn't happen very often.

This is the word that keeps coming up, stuck. That or stumped. And I guess I'll leave it there because I feel as though as we learn more, I'm going to be calling you again to see where these new puzzle pieces fit in and if they take us in a new direction. Dr. Valentin, thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation.

It's my pleasure, Ashley. Thanks for calling. in a new direction. Dr. Valentin, thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation. No, it's my pleasure, Ashley. Thanks for calling.

So there you have it, folks. Day 52, not a good day for Sheriff Chris Nanos. I gotta say,

I'll bet you he was listening. It was live streaming, right? So I'm sure he was like somewhere having to listen to all this, or at least he's got a representative who's going to give him the cliff notes on everything that was said. Uh, where that goes from here, maybe subscribe because I will figure it out and I will put together something to tell you where it goes from here, especially that whole recall effort. And I got some more information for you, uh, coming tomorrow on this podcast on Drop Dead Serious. Don't forget, subscribe so that you don't miss these episodes. Something else that's just like, what the actual F with regard to this crime scene? So again, that's coming tomorrow.

Thank you so much for listening today and for watching today. And remember, the truth isn't just serious, And remember, the truth isn't just serious, it's drop dead serious.