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TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has released the full contents of a ransom note, as well as a second note involving the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, in the hopes that someone might provide a tip to find the suspect.
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Both those notes were sent to our “news tip” email here at 13 News. We’ve previously released only small portions of those notes to avoid harming the ongoing investigation. Now both are being made public by investigators.
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Investigators analyzing the messages sent to Guthrie’s family may be able to use linguistic features within those letters to help build a suspect profile, according to a forensic linguistics expert.
William Eggington, an emeritus professor of linguistics at BYU who has consulted on more than 110 cases, said experts in this type of analysis look for specific patterns in grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation.
“Syntax — so that’s the grammar — does a person have a tendency to use particular grammatical features, particular vocabulary features? And often we can determine the age and the educational background,” Eggington said.
After briefly reviewing the letters, Eggington said one feature that stood out was what he described as syntactic punctuation — specifically, the use of a comma splice.
“The author is using what in educational circles we call a comma splice. So that’s two sentences joined together by a comma rather than by a period. So that’s a tell,” he said.
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Another potential tell includes word choice.
The use of the word “perished” instead of “died” could suggest the author has a higher level of education. However, the misspelling of the word “received” in the first note may indicate limits to that education.
“That sort of goes, OK, this person has not been trained and had sufficient exposure to avoid those kinds of errors,” Eggington said.
That detail may also factor into whether AI played a role in drafting the notes. Eggington said he did not believe AI was involved based on his initial review.
“I haven’t had the material long enough to do that kind of study. But I don’t sense an AI influence with this,” he said.
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Eggington cautioned that linguistic tells are not definitive proof of authorship on their own.
“You help build a profile that leads — sort of narrows down suspects,” he said.
He said this type of analysis is used primarily to confirm a suspect rather than identify one from scratch. In practice, investigators would compare the ransom notes against known writings from a person already under suspicion.
“They will get the notes here, the two ransom notes, and they’ll compare them with the known writings of the suspect,” Eggington said.
Eggington also warned against cherry-picking linguistic similarities without accounting for differences between documents.
“You can just look at the linguistic features of the unknown, the linguistic features of the known, and you can go, ‘Ta-da, look, this person obviously wrote this.’ But you’ve just cherry-picked, because you’re just looking at the similarity features. You haven’t looked at the features that are different,” he said.
Eggington said while linguistic analysis can be a big factor in criminal cases, most famously used in the Unabomber Manifesto and ransom notes, it must also be paired with other evidence outside of linguistics.
He said the standard for using this analysis in court is higher than at the investigative level, requiring connections between a suspect’s known writing and the notes that account for both similarities and differences, as well as being paired with other elements of evidence in this case.
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