The Disappearance of Nancy Guthrie
The grim news out of Tucson is that, thirteen days into the search for Nancy Guthrie, the odds of finding her alive have been dropping by the hour. She is the eighty-four-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie, the longtime co-anchor of the “Today” show. Not long after midnight on February 1st, she vanished from her home in an affluent neighborhood in the Catalina Foothills, on the north end of town. The investigation seemed to inch along until Tuesday, when the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the F.B.I., working jointly on the case, got a break: footage from Guthrie’s doorbell camera, which showed what the veteran journalist and former F.B.I. official John Miller described, on CNN, as “the bogeyman we’ve all feared since we were kids.” An armed intruder stood on Guthrie’s doorstep in the dead of night, wearing a balaclava, a bulky backpack, and what appeared to be black neoprene gloves.
Within twenty-four hours, more than five thousand leads poured in. By Thursday, investigators were looking for a man who’s about five feet nine or five feet ten, of average build. He was said to have been carrying a twenty-five-litre backpack made by Ozark Trail, a brand sold primarily at Walmart. There was talk of a white, unmarked van. Investigators erected a tent around Guthrie’s front door to create a blackout environment that may have allowed them to see how certain materials compared to what showed up in the video; they put out a call for neighbors’ security-camera footage from as far back as January 1st.
Demands for bitcoin had been made to TMZ and other media outlets, but their authenticity remains in question. On Thursday, TMZ’s founder, Harvey Levin, said that he’d received another note from someone who purports to know who abducted Guthrie. According to Levin, the tipster reported needing one bitcoin (worth, this week, at least sixty-five thousand dollars) to say more. The veracity of the note was again unclear, but Levin suggested that it painted “a very bleak picture.”
The F.B.I. doubled its reward for information, to up to a hundred thousand dollars, and the world went back to waiting. Time lines in such cases are vital, and this one was stretching out. The clock started on the evening of January 31st, a Saturday, when Guthrie took an Uber to the home of her daughter Annie, who lives nearby, for dinner and a game night. Annie is Savannah’s older sister; they also have a brother, Camron. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos and the F.B.I., Annie’s husband dropped Guthrie off at home just before 10 P.M., and watched her enter through her garage. Nanos later said that, at that point, “we assume that Nancy’s home and probably going to bed.”
The next morning, she failed to show up at a friend’s house to watch a recording of a church service. Inside her own home was her cellphone, along with other evidence that made it clear she had not left willingly. There was blood spatter on her front stoop, and the blood turned out to be hers. Guthrie was already physically vulnerable. She has trouble walking, and, because of a heart condition, she takes life-sustaining medicine and wears a pacemaker.
On day four of the search, the Guthrie siblings released a video on social media. They sat together on a sofa, in front of a camera, backdropped by a white brick wall. Savannah, with her sister to her right and her brother to her left, read from a sheet of paper. Her face wasn’t made up, as it is for TV, and she spoke in a congested voice that anyone who’s ever cried hard, and at length, would recognize. First, she thanked viewers for their prayers: “We feel them.” The siblings believed that their mother, a devout Christian, felt them, too.
“Our mom is a kind, faithful, loyal, fiercely loving woman of goodness and light,” Savannah said. “She is funny and spunky and clever. She has grandchildren that adore her and crowd around her and cover her with kisses. She loves fun, and adventure. She is a devoted friend. She is full of kindness and knowledge.” Addressing Guthrie’s abductor, she added, “Talk to her, and you’ll see.” Her sister spoke directly to their mother, “Mama. If you’re listening, we need you to come home.”
By the time I arrived in Tucson, on Wednesday, the crime scene had the air of a vigil. The parked vehicles of journalists stretched the length of the once quiet block. A battery of news cameras stood on tripods, all pointed at Guthrie’s front door. Camera operators and correspondents maneuvered carefully, so as not to be pricked by cacti and the long thorns of mesquite trees. Guthrie’s neighborhood is hilly, and dense with the native plants of the Sonoran Desert: acacia and olive trees, prickly pear, palo verde, giant saguaros, some of which stand twenty or more feet tall. Investigators had fanned out in the neighborhood, searching the terrain on foot. One team found and bagged, as evidence, a black glove.
TV news outlets had been treating this and every other twitch in the case as urgent information, before any connection was drawn. The glove, found about a mile and a half from Guthrie’s house, on the side of the road, may be significant, or not; it’s at a forensics lab, being analyzed for traces of DNA, hair, fibres, latent fingerprints. Criminals often separate themselves from evidence as quickly as they can, but so far it is impossible to know whether the glove was, say, tossed from a fleeing vehicle. Lance Leising, a retired F.B.I. agent whom I first met in 2012, as he worked the baffling aftermath of a high-profile ambush and murder of an armored-car guard in suburban Phoenix, told me that conjecture and social media often become “a distraction.”
Guthrie lives on nearly an acre, in a brown-brick, ranch-style house with an attached garage, a short gravel driveway, and desert landscaping. She has been there since the mid-seventies. (Her husband died in 1988.) Her neighbors live within easy walking distance but their homes are barely visible, one to the next, because of folds in the hills and the density of trees and cacti. A sheriff’s cruiser was stationed in Guthrie’s driveway, its lights flashing. At the foot of the driveway, someone had erected a large sign, covered in protective plastic, that read “Dear Guthrie Family, your neighbors stand with you.” A painted stone read “Please pray.” Visitors were leaving potted plants and grocery-store flowers, many of them yellow, symbolizing hope for a safe return. Whenever someone new arrived at the tribute point, reporters pounced on them for comment.
By then, investigators had checked Guthrie’s flat, whitewashed roof and probed her septic tank with a long pole. They had towed away her car. They had searched Annie’s home, and re-searched Nancy’s. Two drones buzzed overhead, and a chopper was up. The public had been fed aerial views of the property: a tidy back-yard parabola of green grass that led to a gated swimming pool and aqua chaise longues; blue planters; an orange tree; a patio with string lights.
John Voorhies, a Tucsonian of sixty-two years, was standing in front of Guthrie’s home, watching the activity. He’d come with a friend—a paralegal and a TikToker who had driven seven hours, from Huntington Beach, California, to see the crime scene and opine about it. Voorhies, wearing an earpiece in his right ear, was listening to this friend live-stream while strolling up and down the street. Eventually, the TikToker stopped and pointed his cellphone camera at Guthrie’s home. The sobering details of the case included the fact that her doorbell camera was disconnected at 1:47 A.M., and that at 2:12 A.M. software detected motion, though it was unclear which software, or what this meant. At 2:28 A.M., Guthrie’s pacemaker disconnected from the app that monitored it, providing an important clue to when she was taken.
Leising described five reasons someone might commit a kidnapping: financial gain, ideology, domestic discord, exploitation (for example, sex trafficking), and “delusion,” or mental illness. One could not help wondering whether Savannah Guthrie’s prominence—at a time when President Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade calling journalists “the enemy of the American people”—was a factor. Tucson is Savannah’s home town; she went to college and got her start in broadcasting here. In November, in a “Today” show feature, she included her sister and mother in a scene at El Charro, a historic restaurant, where she asked Guthrie what she likes about where she lives. Guthrie mentioned “the air, the quality of life—it’s laidback and gentle.” They toasted with prickly-pear margaritas.
On Monday, Savannah had posted another video on social media. This time she appeared alone, speaking extemporaneously as her family entered “another week of this nightmare.” Her hair and makeup were done. She was composed. The media was reporting that there was a 5 P.M. deadline for delivering six million dollars’ worth of bitcoin referenced in one of the so-called ransom notes. Savannah again mentioned faith, telling viewers that their prayers are “lifting” their mother, “even in this moment, and in this darkest place.” The Guthries believed that Nancy was “still out there.” Savannah begged the public for help: “We are at an hour of desperation.”
The images from the doorbell camera show the intruder approaching the alcoved entryway of Guthrie’s house with his head down, walking hunched over, as if trying to avoid his face being seen. In addition to the balaclava, gloves, and backpack, he’s got on a holster that is too big for what looks like a handgun inside it. He’s positioned the holster over his crotch—almost like you’d wear an athletic cup—which anyone with firearms training would recognize as amateurish. (“Tactically, it’s ridiculous,” Miller, the former F.B.I. official, said.) Reflector strips on his backpack catch a bit of ambient light, though the overhead porch light is off. He steps onto Guthrie’s doormat, reaches for the camera, and tries to cover it with his right hand. Then he turns and bends, looking for something on the ground, in the alcove, before stepping onto the front walkway and plucking stems and leaves from a withered plant in the landscaping. He walks back to the camera, with what appears to be a small flashlight between his lips, and tries to obscure the lens with that clump of dead greenery.
The video yielded what Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the F.B.I., called, on CNN, “a treasure trove” of actionable information. Leising told me, “You can go proactive on every item you saw in that video,” adding that the release of the footage likely improved the quality of the incoming leads. The analysis began instantly. The man appeared to be right-handed. His gloves were oddly thick, as if he’d doubled or tripled up. He didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. A former N.Y.P.D. detective told CNN that the suspect’s foot size could be approximated by measuring his shoes against the dimensions of Guthrie’s entryway tiles. The bricks in the entryway wall could roughly indicate height. A criminologist thought that she saw the top of a cellphone peeking out of the man’s right front jacket pocket. Observers kept talking about the man’s gait, but it was hard to draw any conclusions; Leising told me that people often move differently in the dark and when on unfamiliar ground. Facial recognition would be challenging—the balaclava left bare only the suggestion of a mustache, and a possible soul patch, and dark, arched eyebrows.
Did he arrive by automobile? If so, where was it? During the first week of the search, the New York Post reported that one of Guthrie’s neighbors had alerted police to the presence, in the neighborhood, in January, of an unmarked white van. Among the many questions being asked: Was this even a targeted kidnapping at all? Maybe it was a burglary gone wrong. If that were the case, why go to the trouble of taking the homeowner? Was there reason to believe that the man and Guthrie were still in the area? Roughly ten hours passed before Guthrie was reported missing, more than enough time to drive, say, to the border. Nogales, it was noted, is an hour and a half almost due south of Tucson, a straight shot down Interstate 19.
This is peak tourist season for Tucson, the largest city between Phoenix and Mexico, with a metropolitan population of well over a million. I arrived from the sidewalk-ice mountains of New York City to morning temperatures pushing eighty degrees. It’s turned rainy and cooler in the past couple of days, but the creosote bushes are blooming yellow. People have been wearing shorts and sundresses. Many thousands of outsiders are in town for the weather but also for the annual gem-and-mineral show; next week, there’s a big soccer tournament.
History tells us that it will be a public tip that solves the Guthrie case—the authorities have reportedly received some thirty thousand of them, so far. Overwhelm, already a danger to investigators managing a complex case, isn’t helped by online conspiracy theorists and other noisemakers. People have been using A.I. to generate a “face” for the masked man and posting the results on social media. The crime scene had already possibly been compromised by the fact that after it was prematurely released, people came through and “trampled over everything,” a retired F.B.I. agent complained publicly. “People touched things without gloves on.” Early this week, a Domino’s pizza-delivery guy showed up with food for an influencer. The sheriff’s department had to ask the public not to order takeout to a crime scene.
Armchair analysis fills the space that is created by the absence of available facts. Nanos, the sheriff, stopped giving press conferences days ago. Then, on Friday, he sat down with CNN’s Ed Lavandera, and dispelled rumors about tension between his office and the F.B.I. During the interview, Nanos said, “We have some DNA, and we don’t know whose it is,” but declined to elaborate. His office then sent an update to the media, which included: “DNA other than Nancy Guthrie’s and those in close contact to her has been collected from the property. Investigators are working to identify who it belongs to. We are not disclosing where that DNA was located.”
By late afternoon, the batch of flowers and hopeful messages outside Guthrie’s home had swelled, and neighbors had attached yellow ribbons to their mailboxes and trees. Like too many others, I’d been driving back and forth between the sheriff’s department and the crime scene, as everybody waited for the next drip of news. To get to Guthrie’s neighborhood, you can take North Campbell Avenue, a straight road that cuts through a busy business district—taquerias, Oh My Chicken, Ross Dress for Less, Kung Fu Noodle, Cartel Coffee Lab—and begins to curve just after you cross the Rillito River. To the north, Mt. Lemmon looms, monumental, and the terrain gets a bit steeper. A few turns and there is Guthrie’s place. There are no gates, or street lights.
A signature feature of Tucson is its nighttime skies, which the city protects with an ordinance designed to suppress light pollution. Voorhies, the local whom I met on my first day in town, told me, “You can’t see your hand in front of your face.” Come back at night, he said, and listen to the coyotes howl. ♦