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Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her Tucson, Arizona, home two weeks ago, setting off a potent chain reaction of federal and local criminal investigation, amateur sleuthing and public obsession that – so far – has resulted in neither the 84-year-old grandmother being located or anyone named as a suspect or, indeed, arrested.
It is a case that is both enthralling and baffling the American public, casting doubts on the ability of investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery that each day generates a fresh 24-hour news cycle – but seemingly little in the way of solid fresh leads likely to solve the case.
On Thursday suspicions grew that the case may not be a kidnap-for-ransom scheme focused on the mother of the NBC Today show host Savannah Guthrie – or at least that her abduction did not start out as a kidnapping – but perhaps a burglary gone wrong.
Guthrie’s family have ceased issuing appeals to the would-be kidnapper or kidnappers. No communication is recorded. No ransom has been paid. But the FBI has doubled the reward for information leading to an arrest to $100,000, offered a description of a man 5ft 9in or 5ft 10in tall with an average build, and given a description of a black 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker backpack he was wearing.
“We hope this updated description will help concentrate the public tips we are receiving,” the FBI stated in the X post. The agency said it had collected more than 13,000 tips since Guthrie was taken from her home on 1 February.
Donald Trump was asked Friday whether the drug cartels or potentially another “nation state” could be involved in Guthrie’s disappearance.
“You can’t say that yet”, he responded outside the White House. “It’s a little bit early. But it’s somebody [who] either knew what they were doing very well, or they were rank amateurs. Either way, it’s not a good situation”.
The Pima county sheriff’s department said it had fielded more than 18,000 calls and asked residents living near Guthrie’s home for video surveillance footage going back weeks. Then surveillance video circulated online of a man attempting to scale a wall five miles away, wearing similar clothes and backpack to a man seen in video recovered from the doorbell camera at Guthrie’s home on the night of the crime. Officials told NBC News that law enforcement officers had cleared the man.
That video, recovered from Google archives, showed the presumed abductor, or an accomplice, in a ski mask and neoprene gloves carrying what appeared to be a pistol in an oddly placed holster, attempting to block the lens with vegetation from Guthrie’s garden.
The black-and-white image of a masked man bearing flowers, described as a small “bouquet of weeds” by some observers, vividly gave form to the contours of deception and ill-intent playing out across the inhospitable terrain of the desert south-west.
Soon after, delivery driver Carlos Palazuelos was detained during a traffic stop south of Tucson near the US-Mexico border. His home in Rio Rico was searched on a judge’s approval. Palazuelos, who was later released, told Telemundo that he didn’t recall delivering anything to Guthrie’s house, didn’t know who she is and wasn’t involved.
Then there was a black glove found on a road, and one in Guthrie’s home. Rumors of a rift between local investigators and the FBI emerged after one was sent to a private crime lab in Florida and not to FBI headquarters in Virginia for analysis. The Pima county sheriff, Chris Nanos, denied he was withholding evidence from the FBI and that an agent had told him, “We do not want the media to divide us.”
Investigators have also made repeated trips to the home of Annie Guthrie, sister of Savannah and a poet, and her husband Tommaso Cioni, a science and biology teacher, and the last to see Nancy when he dropped her at home hours before her abduction.
The sheriff’s department hasn’t provided an official news briefing in over a week, allowing the citizen sleuths to fill the vacuum with a range of theories Almost any man who fits the rough description of a 5ft 10in man connected to the family has been brought under online suspicion.
The case, likened variously to the Lindbergh baby case in the 1930s, to an episode of Columbo and to the Keystone Cops, has at root a missing elderly woman whose fate is unknown. A series of purported ransom emails containing a demand for $6m in bitcoin and two deadlines sent to celebrity news outlet TMZ and two local TV stations are now rarely mentioned.
Guthrie’s family have said they believe she is still alive but have no way to directly contact the ransom seekers and have not received the so-called “proof of life” they asked for.
Joe Petito, father of Gabby Petito who went missing on a 2021 cross-country road trip and was later found to have been murdered by her fiance, Brian Laundrie, told Fox & Friends that false leads and misinformation made the search more difficult.
“A lot of outside influence will try to give an opinion,” Petito said. Investigators, he added, “have all of the information or as much as possible. So I just hope they’re listening to what they feel is best.” The statement, and its implicit appeal to intuition, brought to mind Columbo.
But armchair detectives are not out in the field, as FBI agents are, knocking on doors and picking through inhospitable desert terrain of cactuses, bushes and boulders, in 80F heat in search of clues to crack a case of a missing woman authorities believe was taken against her will and whose blood was found on her front porch.
“In hindsight we can say that ransom note was a fake and sent after the case went national,” says Bryanna Fox, a former FBI profiler at the University of South Florida.
“That said, imagine being in the Guthries’ shoes and thinking ‘what if it is real and we don’t treat it as real?’ But who conducts a kidnapping-for-ransom and goes to the crime scene without a ransom note prepared? It’s so contrary to kidnapping.”
Fox says the recent harvest of clues, despite lacking any definite resolution in the case, are substantial. “We’re waiting for the dividends,” she says. “One of those 4,000 tips sent to the FBI has to play out.”
The task now will be to winnow them out and to get a potential suspect or suspects “committed to a story and track down the details of their story. If there are a lot of holes in it, you’ve got something more.” Fox says it’s possible Palazuelos knows more. “I’m not saying this man is involved, but is that a possibility? Yes.”
Key to cracking the case may be the black-and-white images. Fox points to the resolution of recent cases – the murder of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to name one – in which a suspect was arrested with help from surveillance films. “Maybe we just have to let a little more time go by for those leads to turn into an identification,” Fox says. “I’m optimistic.”
