The Journal. - How Did Nancy Guthrie Vanish Without a Trace?

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Six months after Savannah Guthrie's mother Nancy was kidnapped from her home in Tucson, Ariz., investigators have little to show beyond a trail of tragic missteps and bad luck. WSJ’s Valerie Bauerlein reports on how early errors, attention from amateur sleuths and public feuding have complicated the case. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: - Camp Swamp Road Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'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.

And we will never stop looking for her. We will always ache for her and feel that whole in our hearts. This 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 Boraline. How could this happen in this time?

of like 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 B what was going on at key moments. We interviewed just dozens of people, bots of, of, FOIA request of personnel files and lease records, lots of current and former investigators

in the case, and as many people as we could. If you could boil it down, what is it 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 thought about it kind of in three ways. Bad luck, bad calls, and bad blood. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, August 3rd.

Coming up on the show, why has one of the highest profile criminal investigations in the country gone nowhere? This episode is presented by SAP. Your company's ambitions can't be held back by long implementation, surprise costs, or empty AI promises. SAP Grow AI Cloud ERP gets you live fast. Keeps pricing predictable and delivers built-in AI that gets results the first day, not someday. All on a single platform that's easy to manage industry-ready and design to scale with your business. Bring it with SAP Grow.

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Nancy 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. And 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. Let'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 and 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. Her 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 person's 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. For a few hours, law enforcement seemed to be running the investigation both as a missing

person's 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. Every, you have got to preserve every ounce that you can of information that's there to give you clues. And 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 4872 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. In 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. The 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 work 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 shit out of you.

He 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's department with all the trappings of other popular police shows. It's lawless out here. 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 one re-electionist sheriff. It had been a tight and contentious campaign. And 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, rules. 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. Doubts 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. It 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. And 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. And then after they received the note, you know, so there's a clock ticking here. Yeah. 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, 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. Please reach out to us. Once that ransom note comes in, because it's electronic,

that is FBI's jurisdiction, right? Jurisictional lines, it crosses digital communication. So immediately that becomes the FBI's part of the case to deal with. Okay, so what did the Guthrie's 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. Like if someone accessed it, try to find that. person. Nobody ever touched it.

The Guthrie's 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. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level? This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. The 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 were invited into a glimpse of their family. And she had done a hometown segment in Tucson where she did, you know, an eight-minute kind of montage of all of the things in town that mean a lot to her. I grew up there, went to college there, my mom so lives there. And honestly, a part of me has really never left. And it closed with an interview with her mom. Well, mom, you guys came here in the 70s and you had been moving all around.

what made you want to stay in Tucson and Aunt Ruth? And 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.

She 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? What? 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? And I said, I'm sorry, sweetie, but yeah, maybe. As 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.

New 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 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. Besides all of them just being there, you know, adding to the crowd, How else did the presence of all of these live streamers, this 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. And I'm not casting aspersions here, but I'm saying like a hiker found a bone in the desert, a human bone. The recent discovery of human bones sparked true crime theories across the country.

And 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. There 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 Cash Patelag 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 this year. Cash Patel made this point in a media appearance in May.

The first 48 hours of anyone's disappearance are the most critical. And here's how these cases works. 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. The 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. The 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 Cash 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-in systems. And they were able to. And the way Patel decided to release the footage was through his own ex-account. He blasts out on X these shocking video and still footage of a man and a mask with a visible gun and a backpack.

coming up, walking up into 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. And 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 United Healthcare Seats, But this video footage didn't generate any decisive new leads in the Guthrie case. Since then, Cash 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 FBI has met every assistance request asked of us, even when requests came late. The most we now know about Nancy Guthrie's whereabouts comes from the kidnappers.

Five 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 the 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. She posts a video seated on a couch

between her brother and sister. 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 an kind of hostage negotiation language, code in 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 since then, you know, six months since Nancy Guthrie 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. They really have. There are dozens and dozens of people, as I understand it, still actively working this case, looking into other DNA leads, according to the sheriff, but thousands and thousands of hours of video surveillance came in, sorting through that, sorting through tips.

The Pima County Sheriff's Office says the kidnapping is not, a cold case. Still, there's seemingly been no new information for months. It's going to take a big break in the case, according to our sources, someone coming forward and saying what they know are giving enough of a clue. If someone who knows something came forward, they're optimistic that they could find her. In kidnapping cases, the common sense logic is that getting as much of the human sense logic is that Getting as much attention as possible can only help.

The higher the awareness, the more likely there'll be a break. That's the reason there are amber alerts and pictures of missing kids on the back of milk cartons. But the attention to this case, the perfect storm of Savannah Guthrie's fame, the social media frenzy, and the public feuding between law enforcement agencies, it's oversaturated. And instead of bringing more clarity, it seems to have obscured the truth. There are a lot of people seeking the spotlight here. There become sort of allegiances and teams. Are you pro this side or anti-that-side?

Who do you think did it? There are all these theories that get a lot of oxygen. And we see that in all elements of social media, right? Like you can say what you want, but it becomes like this immense amount of noise. And it gets very hard to separate the signal from the noise. Right. And there are, there are,

consequences to that. But it's just such a human tragedy at the core of it. That's all for today, Monday, August 3rd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Hannah Critchfield and Jared Mideovich. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.