How Did Nancy Guthrie Vanish Without a Trace?

0:05I'm coming on today with a very specific message. It has been months since our mom was taken from us. Savannah Guthrie, co-host of The Today Show, posted this message on Instagram last week about her mother, Nancy. Our family is in agony. We are in a nightmare that will not end. Nothing about our situation has changed. Nancy Guthrie was taken six months ago this past weekend. There have been no charges or credible leads in months. We will never stop looking for her. We will always ache for her and feel that hole in our hearts.

0:48This has been such a big story in American life. But can we just try to make sense of what happened here and answer this core question? how can someone disappear without a trace? That's our colleague, Valerie Borlein. How could this happen in this time of digital surveillance, right, where every move we make is recorded? How could we not know where she is? Valerie has been working with a team in the newsroom to try to figure out why the Guthrie case has been so hard to crack. We've spent months digging in on the case, trying to find out everything that we could, building immense timelines just to see beat by beat what was going on at key moments.

1:33We interviewed just dozens of people, lots of FOIA requests of personnel files and police records, lots of current and former investigators in the case, and as many people as we could.

1:50If you could boil it down, what is at the root of why Nancy Guthrie hasn't been found? It's not just one factor, right? It was a perfect storm of factors, and in my mind, I've thought about it kind of in three ways. Bad luck, bad calls, and bad blood.

2:12Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, August 3rd.

2:25Coming up on the show, why has one of the highest profile criminal investigations in the country gone nowhere?

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3:37various 18 plus.

3:46Nancy Guthrie's home is in Pima County, Arizona, on the edge of Tucson. It's a vast landscape, dusty and spiked with saguaro cacti. And one of the shocking things to me about visiting there, I live in North Carolina, I've grown up in the South. It is so vast. So it's like 9 ,000 square miles. It takes three hours to drive across Pima County, that area, and only 400 square miles of that 9 ,000 is developed. The rest of it is desert. On Saturday, January 31st, Nancy Guthrie had dinner with the family of her older daughter, Annie. Afterward, her son-in-law drove her home. He watched her go in the garage and watched the garage door shut at 9.48, 9.50 p.m.

4:33And so that's the last time anyone sees her alive. The next morning, Guthrie was supposed to meet a friend, but she never showed up. So Annie went over to her mom's house and found things that immediately set off alarm bells. And, you know, the family has said later that the back doors were propped open. Nancy Guthrie's iPhone and purse were there. and they realized pretty quickly that a lot of things were awry and immediately called 911 to say, our mother's missing and we don't know what's going on here. And that was at roughly 12 o 'clock. On Sunday. Local time on Sunday.

5:18Let's take a moment here, Val. Can you just tell us a little bit more about Nancy Guthrie? Who is she? She grew up in a small town in Kentucky and went to the University of Kentucky and studied journalism and married a man that she met there. He was a mining engineer. And they traveled all around the world as they started their family. And they were living actually in Australia when the youngest of their three kids, Savannah, was born in the early 1970s. And they decided, well, now it's time that we put down roots, and they decided on Tucson. Nancy Guthrie has lived in Tucson ever since. She was 84 and lived alone.

5:56Her family said she was mentally sharp, but physically frail. She had a pacemaker and some heart issues, and she had a very bad back that caused her difficulty walking. The family has said it was difficult for her to even walk to the mailbox and back unassisted. So they felt strongly it wasn't a wander off. But that was exactly what the lead supervisor on the scene told the sheriff at first. In a text, he called it a missing persons case. But there were some very concerning signs, most notably that her doorbell nest camera was missing, seemingly ripped out. So the supervisor called in homicide.

6:34For a few hours, law enforcement seemed to be running the investigation both as a missing persons case and as a criminal investigation. But even though the sheriff's department seemed to think a kidnapping was possible, they failed to seal off the property as a crime scene to protect any evidence. That failure would allow reporters, live streamers, and even a pizza delivery person to walk right up onto the front porch. So why is it important that they didn't seal off the crime scene? A crime scene, particularly a violent crime, is totally different. You have got to preserve every ounce that you can of information that's there to give you clues.

7:16and not realizing that's what had happened really delayed preserving evidence. I can't tell you the number of times you'll hear a criminologist say that a crime scene is like a stove. It cools down almost immediately when you turn it off. So I think there was precious time that was lost in those 48, 72 first hours that couldn't be recovered. Also, a search and rescue plane sat on the ground until dusk that first day because they couldn't find someone to operate its sophisticated surveillance system, according to the Wall Street Journal's reporting. By the time they got it in the air, it was getting too dark for the plane's zoom lens cameras to be of much use.

7:56In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos disputed those findings. We put our heads down and just do the work. I can assure everybody that we are working hard every day with all of our partners.

8:16The Sheriff's Department launched drones. Border Patrol agents went out with search dogs. That first afternoon, detectives released her photo and description and contacted a volunteer group to help search the neighborhood. Detectives worked through the night collecting evidence. Talk about the agency that was in charge of this investigation, the local Sheriff's Department, and who runs it. So the Pima County Sheriff's Department is run by the elected sheriff, a guy named Chris Nanos. And he is a command and control guy. We have reporting that suggests that after his election initially, he called his direct reports into his office and said, I'm going to micromanage the s*** out of you.

8:56He is a very hands-on, decisive person, and he doesn't shy from the spotlight. So much, in fact, that at the time of the Guthrie investigation, the cable channel A &E had released a reality TV show called Desert Law. It featured Nanos' department with all the trappings of other popular police shows. It's lawless out here. Desert Law premieres Wednesday, January 7th. You're out enforcing the law in the blistering heat during the day. You're out finding the bad guys in the dark of night. So he wanted to show the spotlight on his department. Nanos had just won re-election as sheriff. It had been a tight and contentious campaign.

9:38And afterward, Nanos overhauled the department. The sheriff had named new department heads in multiple departments in the months leading up to this kidnapping, including homicide, including cold case, including some critical decision-making roles. That new head of homicide had been reprimanded for poor judgment in a homicide investigation just two months earlier, according to his personnel records. He would go on to run the Guthrie case. Charges in that case were dropped for insufficient evidence. The head of homicide did not respond to a request for comment.

10:16Doubts about whether or not Nancy Guthrie had wandered off ended the next day. That's when the family found out about a ransom note. On that Monday night, a ransom note comes in, but not directly to the family, right? It came in through a local, there's a big CBS affiliate in Tucson, and they're a big player in Arizona. and these folks send a ransom note in over the tip line through a masked IP address. Makes it very difficult to trace. But there are some clues in there that tell law enforcement pretty quickly they seem like they might know what they're talking about here. So they share this note with the family.

10:56And it says, hello, Savannah. We have your mother. She's safe, but don't screw this up. Here's our demand. And they demanded$4 million in Bitcoin through this crypto address in three days time. And so that was a big moment. So that was that first Monday night, unbeknownst to the public yet, but this major development happens with this ransom note.

11:24And then after they received the note, you know, so there's a clock ticking here. After they received the ransom note, Savannah Guthrie and her two siblings posted a video on Instagram where they talked to the kidnappers directly. Can you describe that video for us? It's, I mean, it is wrenching to watch. We too have heard the reports about a ransom letter in the media. As a family, we are doing everything that we can. We are ready to talk. They know the clock is ticking in more ways than one, right? Because their mother has significant health problems. Her health, her heart is fragile. she lives in constant pain she is without any medicine she needs it to survive so they're very very in addition to being heartbroken they're very highly motivated to talk we need to know without a doubt that she is alive and that you have her We want to hear from you, and we are ready to listen.

12:32Please reach out to us. Once that ransom note comes in, because it's electronic, that is FBI's jurisdiction, right? Jurisdictional lines, it crosses digital communication. So immediately that becomes the FBI's part of the case to deal with. Okay, so what did the Guthries do in response to the ransom note? My understanding is they were very much taking the counsel of the FBI, the folks who are experienced in dealing with this. They did not want to send$4 million to someone without some sort of proof of life, right? They wanted to know she was alive. And so our understanding is that at the advice of the FBI, they authorized the FBI to send a small transaction, a kind of a down payment on that to that Bitcoin address and then trace it.

13:20Like if someone accessed it, try to find that person. Nobody ever touched it. The Guthries never sent the full ransom. And as the family was going through this private agony, the world, it seemed, was arriving on Nancy Guthrie's doorstep. That's after the break.

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14:29the Nancy Guthrie case exploded onto the national stage almost immediately even President Trump got involved posting about it on social media the main reason the case has gotten so much attention is Savannah Guthrie she's one of the best known broadcast journalists in the country Approximately 3 million Americans wake up with her every morning. Part of the reason that we feel so close to these big public figures is we feel like we know them and we're invited into a glimpse of their family. And she had done a hometown segment in Tucson where she did an eight-minute kind of montage of all of the things in town that mean a lot to her.

15:08I grew up there, went to college there, my mom still lives there, and honestly, a part of me has really never left. And it closed with an interview with her mom. Mom, you guys came here in the 70s and you'd been moving all around. What made you want to stay in Tucson and at Roots? It's so wonderful. Just the air, the quality of life is played back and gentle. And I think there was some sense, did I bring this on? Did I bring this to her bedside in the middle of the night? this violent kidnapper who took her. After her mother disappeared, Savannah took two months away from the show. When she came back, she gave an interview about her mother's kidnapping.

15:55She was emotional as she remembered a conversation she had with her brother about how her fame might have led to the crime. And he said, I think she's been kidnapped for ransom. And I said, what? Well, why, what? And then, I mean, it sounds so, like, how dumb could I be? But I just, I didn't want to believe. I just said, do you think because of me?

16:30And I said, I'm sorry, sweetie, but, yeah, maybe.

16:38As Savannah Guthrie struggled with the possible impact of her fame on her mother's disappearance, people from around the country were flocking to Tucson. The case had become a media circus, on par, Valerie says, with the wall-to-wall coverage around the O.J. Simpson double murder case. It's fascinating to me because I've been a reporter for 30 years, and I've covered a lot of big stories, major national stories. And over the years, you got used to seeing the satellite trucks and the reporters. But this time, the ratio of social media and YouTube influencers, true crime people, just accompanying the traditional press corps was remarkable.

17:21New bombshell stuff out. Holy smokes, folks. I am more than happy to look at any and every theory, okay? Something tells me there's more to it, and they don't have, they didn't release everything to the public. There's like entire lanes of traffic that are blocked by people with, you know, tripods and ring lights sitting in the road. It created an environment that the neighbors felt very much under siege and kind of shut down to talking about the case.

17:55Besides all of them just being there, you know, adding to the crowd, how else did the presence of all of these live streamers, these YouTubers affect the case? Amateur sleuths bring so much attention to a case and a lot of good questions a lot of times, but it also creates so much distraction. And what that meant was even in times when there's a vacuum of information, which has been a lot of the time in this case, you still had this one very prolific YouTuber, for example, who broadcast just in the first month, something on the order of 400 hours of material. There were a number of false flags that were amplified on live streams.

18:38And I'm not casting aspersions here, but I'm saying like a hiker found a bone in the desert, a human bone.

18:50And there's a lot of like hours and hours and hours of conjecture about this. And the University of Arizona Anthropology Department pretty quickly said, y 'all, that bone is like a thousand years old. But it just created this kind of frisson in the air where it was hard to separate what was true and what was rumored to be true. Beyond the confusion caused by the amateur sleuths, the investigation itself was also messy. On February 5th, five days after Guthrie had vanished, the FBI announced it had moved from a supporting role to a partner in the case. But the Wall Street Journal's reporting shows that FBI Director Cash Patel and Sheriff Nanos never spoke to each other.

19:29There is some disconnect about the FBI's role and what they say their involvement was and what the sheriff says their involvement was and when. So I want to be clear about that. The sheriff has said that the FBI was involved starting that Monday morning. Hey, we've got a violent crime here. We're going to bring this task force together. So that process is started early in the week, according to the sheriff's office. But Kash Patel said, look, we were blocked out. They froze us out. we would have gotten a lot more information and maybe could have solved this case, but for the sheriff. Cash Patel made this point in a media appearance in May.

20:03The first 48 hours of anyone's disappearance are the most critical. And here's how these cases work. It is a state matter. It's a state and local law enforcement matter. What we, the FBI, do is say, hey, we're here to help. What do you need? What can we do? And for four days, we were kept out of the investigation. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Nano said there wasn't any delay. If Patel really believes that his office tried to block the FBI, Nano said, quote, I 100 % want him to call me because that's the furthest from the truth. One major point of tension was around DNA testing of evidence that turned up.

20:39The FBI wanted it sent to Quantica, right? They wanted it sent to the FBI lab. We've got the most sophisticated technology. And the sheriff sent it to the lab he wanted to. Nano sent DNA samples to a private lab in Florida that the sheriff's department routinely contracted with. And that's not just, like, bad feeling. That's actually, like, decisions that were made that may or may not have affected the outcome of the case. None of the DNA samples have turned up useful findings. Nano said he used the Florida lab instead of the FBI's because it already had samples from family members and others known to have visited the house.

21:20The FBI's work did lead to perhaps the biggest break in the case. The sheriff's department had struggled to recover video from Nancy Guthrie's missing doorbell camera. What Kash Patel has said they were able to do was go to tech partners and say, help us here. Recover this video that nobody thinks can be recovered through bits and bytes that are in kind of back-end systems. And they were able to. And the way Patel decided to release the footage was through his own X account. He blasts out on X these shocking video and still footage of a man in a mask with a visible gun and a backpack coming up, walking up onto Nancy Guthrie's front step, walking up in the dead of night, leaning over the camera, and it's just, it's shocking to watch.

22:11and it was viewed on his social media channels millions and millions of times. This kind of evidence is critical. Getting an image of a perpetrator is often what breaks a case. It helped identify the Boston Marathon bombers, for example, and Luigi Mangione, who's been charged in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. But this video footage didn't generate any decisive new leads in the Guthrie case. Since then, Kash Patel, who had promised to lead the charge, has gone largely silent. An FBI spokesperson said that the state has always been the lead in this investigation, and that, quote, The most we now know about Nancy Guthrie's whereabouts comes from the kidnappers.

23:05Five days after she was taken, the Guthrie family received another ransom note. And what did that second note say? We know now, we did not know at the time, but we know now that that second note said effectively, we did not realize how serious her health issues were. She perished very quickly after. There's nothing you could have done. She is buried in nature, and you will not hear from us anymore. In response to this second note, which was not made public at the time, the family made another Instagram video that was pretty cryptic. We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her.

23:53She posts a video seated on the couch between her brother and sister. This is the only way we will have peace. this is very valuable to us and we will pay and for people that had experience in and kind of hostage negotiation language code and language it was widely read to be okay there was some sort of message that the mom had died and we now know that she had according to these kidnappers and and since then you know six months since nancy guthrough disappeared more than five months essentially since that last note. What have the authorities done to find Nancy Guthrie? I mean, in fairness, they have worked around the clock.