Investigators in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie have now taken in more than 50,000 tips, a former FBI special agent said, a sign the search for the 84-year-old Arizona woman has become a sprawling case nearly four months after she vanished. Harry Trombitas said he believes the names of the people involved are probably buried somewhere in that flood of calls and messages.
That is why the case keeps drawing attention now, especially for Savannah Guthrie, the family member most publicly tied to it. Nancy Guthrie was last seen around 9:45 p.m. on Jan. 31, when family members dropped her off at her home in the Catalina Foothills north of Tucson after dinner. By noon the next day, she was missing, after failing to appear at a friend’s home to watch an online church service.
The scale of the investigation helps explain why it has not gone quiet. Trombitas said the sheer number of tips matters because investigators have to separate noise from names that can be used in court. He said the case is now about building something that can survive prosecution, not just finding a lead that sounds promising for the moment.
Authorities are working through several pieces at once: doorbell camera footage of a masked person the FBI said was armed, video of a speeding car near the time of the disappearance, a backpack that may have been bought online and a damaged utility box that investigators think could be tied to an internet outage around the same time. They are also processing mixed DNA from Nancy Guthrie’s home, including a hair sample, after sending samples first to a private lab in Florida and then in April to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., for advanced analysis.
But the case still has a gap that has not been filled in public. The Pima County sheriff and the FBI have not identified a suspect or a motive, even though Sheriff Chris Nanos has said investigators believe they know why Guthrie’s home was targeted. Nanos said on May 11, when the case reached 100 days, that he believed an arrest would eventually be made and that investigators would not give up simply because the calendar kept moving.
That is the friction in the case now: authorities say they have multiple forms of evidence and tens of thousands of tips, but they have not told the public who they are looking for or what happened after Guthrie was dropped off at home. Former FBI special agent Lisa Miller said the case does not fit a typical robbery or wrench attack theory, even as investigators continue to sort through the possibility that someone was after money and may have targeted the wrong household. Nearly four months in, the case is no closer to public resolution, but it is also far from stalled.
