Buscando Corazones Nogales mounted a search in the Mariposa area on Wednesday after receiving an anonymous tip that 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie’s remains were buried there, but the volunteers and officials came up empty. The group said it investigated the site identified by the caller and excavated deeper than in earlier work, yet found no human remains.
Ramona Guadalupe Ayala Ortiz, a spokesperson for the group, said: "We received an anonymous call telling us that the woman’s [Guthrie’s] remains were in the Mariposa area — in a grave over a stream" and that volunteers followed the lead immediately. The search operation included the Sonora State Commission for the Search of Missing Person and was secured by municipal and state security forces to protect volunteers and workers in the field.
The search returned a null result despite the gravity of the allegation and the area’s recent history: earlier this year Buscando Corazones Nogales located 25 unmarked graves in Mariposa. Organizers said the latest effort went deeper than the initial recoveries, probing ground and streambeds the group had not fully examined before, but the specific tip about Guthrie did not yield evidence.
Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Tucson home in the early hours of Feb. 1. Tucson is more than 70 miles north of Nogales. The investigation into her disappearance remains active; there have been no arrests and investigators report no new leads since the February disappearance.
The involvement of Sonora’s state search commission and local security forces underscored how seriously authorities treated the anonymous allegation. Volunteers said they coordinated with officials on access and excavation safety; municipal and state units provided the security perimeter while searchers worked the site identified by the tipster.
The friction between the tip and the result is immediate: an anonymous call produced a specific location and a vivid claim — a grave over a stream — yet the ground did not match the allegation. That gap leaves two facts standing side by side: Buscando Corazones Nogales has a record in Mariposa, where 25 graves were found earlier, and this latest, deeper search turned up nothing tied to Guthrie.
Organizers told reporters they will continue search operations in the Mariposa area but offered no timetable for the next excursion. Investigators and the volunteer group said they will keep evaluating tips as they come in, but for now the most direct question remains unsettled: whether the anonymous tip pointed to a real burial that simply escaped detection, or to misinformation that sent volunteers and officials on a fruitless excavation.
The unresolved result shifts the focus back to investigators and future searches. With no arrests and no new leads, the next steps will determine whether Mariposa yields more evidence in this case or whether Guthrie’s disappearance will require other avenues of inquiry to produce answers.
