The second ransom note was not a secret inside newsrooms. It was a secret the newsrooms agreed, for a time, not to tell. KOLD in Tucson received communications in early February. CBS, NBC, CNN and others learned the contents of a February 6 message that claimed Nancy Guthrie had died shortly after she was taken, that the death was believed to be heart related, and that she was buried in nature. Law enforcement asked outlets to hold the details while the investigation was at a sensitive stage.

CBS journalist Anna Schecter later said there was a real concern about messing up an investigation and about slowing the momentum of the public’s help, the neighborhood cameras and the people who might still look at footage if they believed a living woman might still be found. Local stations complied. National desks complied. The family, which already knew, recorded a February 7 video that answered “your message” without quoting the death claim, a posture that reads differently once the second note is public. For four months the country was told there were ransom notes and a masked figure and a missing grandmother. It was not told that one of the notes had already declared her ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.

That information broke in late June, first through NBC News and then through BBC, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes and others. Savannah addressed it on Today with tears and a plea that somebody knows something. Critics of the hold argued that the public cannot help with a case whose most important document is hidden. Defenders argued that publishing a death claim in February could have ended searches, ended tips, and ended any chance that a captor still watching television might return a living woman. Both arguments can be true at once.

The ethical problem is not unique to this case, but the celebrity of the daughter made the silence louder. When the sheriff’s department finally released the texts on July 31, it did so not as a confession of a media bargain but as a forensic appeal: distinctive linguistic characteristics might be recognizable to someone who knows the writer. The months of withholding therefore had two costs and one possible benefit. The cost to the public was an incomplete story. The cost to the family was living with a sentence the country did not yet know. The possible benefit was time. Whether that time produced a lead that would not have existed otherwise is something investigators have not said. What can be said is that the Nancy Guthrie case is now a case study in how a modern investigation manages information as carefully as it manages DNA, and how a death sentence written in February can wait until June to become news

Source: BBC News