Hey everyone, welcome.

I’m Ashley Banfield.

This is Drop Deadad Serious.

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Okay, I have something that I need to bring to you.

Um, I’ve been thinking about this for a month and a half and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Every time somebody asks me, is the Nancy Guthrie case going cold? I say be patient.

Just hold on.

Don’t forget it took 47 days to arrest Brian Coberger.

We’re now at day 47.

And that’s why this day, day 47 in the Nancy Guthrie investigation has been weighing on me.

As it’s been approaching, I have felt this sense of foroding because this is why I asked everyone to be patient.

Day 47, it took 47 days to arrest Brian Coberger.

And so here we are in the Nancy Guthrie investigation and all sources uh tell reporters and those who are investigating this case um in the media that there are no suspects.

There are no leads that are really hot right now according to sources.

And my sources said, not only do they not have any suspects, they don’t even have enough evidence to scrape together to satisfy a judge to sign a warrant for a raid or a search.

You know, like that may be where we’re at.

I hope we’re wrong.

I hope behind the scenes police are as close as they were on day 46 before they got Brian Cobberger because I remember that day.

Day 46 was my birthday in Brian Coberger and I felt like that trail had gone cold only the next day to hear they got him.

They got a guy.

So, let’s just hope that right now here on our own day 47 in the Nancy Guthrie investigation, there may be actually something behind the scenes that we know nothing about because the sense of hopelessness is real.

Don’t say cold because cold means there are no more leads to chase down and they had 40,000 at last count, right? Loads of tips.

So have hope.

.image

You know, Savannah said it enough in her videos that you’ve got to pray and you’ve got to have hope.

And that’s all we can have right now as we go past this Rubicon of day 47, which was my barometer with regard to the Idaho case.

So, what I decided to do today, uh, because a lot of people I run into ask me questions like, “What is what’s the latest in the Nancy Guthrie investigation? Did they ever find the guy? and uh whatever happened to and I have found that not everybody has the full picture.

Some people were really, you know, dedicated to following the case in the first week or 3 weeks or five weeks and now we’re going into like seven, you know.

Um and so I put together a full recap everything from the beginning, everything that’s happened so far in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie in this case.

You may know some of it.

You may know a lot of it.

You may not know all of it.

And so today at day 47, I decided it’s time just to put the whole case together so that you can get up to speed because I’m hoping that once you have this behind you when that arrest comes, you’ll know all of it.

And when they start dumping out information in those affidavit, right, the search warrants, the arrest affidavit, you’ll say, “Oh, yeah.

I remember that from day five.

” Right? So, full recap here.

You probably remember this.

Nancy Guthrie was 84 years old.

And that’s the kind of person in the business of true crime we call a vulnerable person, right? Nancy is the mom of the Today Show host, Savannah Guthrie, who’s been off the air ever since this happened.

This case now at day 47.

Um, we are about to enter week eight after this weekend, right? will head into the eighth week of this case, which means the story’s been unfolding for nearly two months.

And the deeper it goes, the stranger it seemed to get.

What began as just a desperate search, right, for this missing elderly woman quickly became something well, just way more ominous, right? Investigators treating Nancy Guthri’s home as a crime scene really from the very first hour.

Since then, we’ve seen alleged ransom demands.

We’ve seen a fake extortionist, a guy who was charged in federal court with that with that charge, with that count, alleged to have been doing this, right? A family put under a police microscope.

Dramatic FBI video images that were released of a suspect and a terrifying Bellaclava at NY’s front door.

DNA recovered from multiple locations and gloves, right? Even DNA recovered from inside NY’s home DNA.

They don’t know.

They said it’s male DNA that isn’t in her circle.

But it’s tricky.

It’s mixed.

And they’re trying to work with it.

And they’re not getting far.

And they got stopped at Kotus, the national database.

It couldn’t be loaded in there because it’s it’s just partial sample, but they’re still working on it.

We’ve seen locations that have been tested and retested.

We’ve seen SWAT raids.

We’ve seen gun stores being canvased, gun store workers being asked questions, asked, “Look at these pictures in these names.

Put them into your list.

See if they did they buy a gun here.

” And we’ve seen a lot more than that, too.

So, let me walk you through where the case started, where it’s going.

Um, and let’s start right from the beginning.

January 31st, the night of January 31st, Nancy Guthrie goes to dinner at her daughter and her son-in-law’s house and uh she takes an Uber, she goes to Annie and Tomaso’s house and she arrives there in that Uber about 5:32 p.

m.

and she has dinner and the sheriff says plays games, does the things we do on a Saturday night with our families, but then she gets a ride back home.

She doesn’t take an Uber back home, she gets a ride.

The Pima County Sheriff, man named Chris Nanos, which is, you know, a name that’s pretty much a household name by now, first said that NY’s daughter, Annie, brought her home.

And then he told the New York Times that NY’s son-in-law, Tomaso, brought her home.

And then he told somebody else that Annie and Tomaso, brought her home.

And then publicly, he decided to just change all of that and say, “Let’s just leave it at family.

” So family dropped Nancy back at her home.

And at 9:48 p.

m.

, he said that her garage door opened.

And then at 9:50 p.

m.

, 2 minutes later, that garage door closed.

And the sheriff said presumably at that point, uh, Nancy Guthrie would be getting ready for bed and going off to sleep.

But nearly 4 hours later, 1:47 a.

m.

, now it is February 1st, the doorbell camera disconnected.

Now, do I know if it’s the front doorbell camera? I don’t know that.

Do I even know that it’s a doorbell camera? I don’t.

It was just camera disconnected at 1:47 a.

m.

Which would make you wonder which one? Because maybe she has plenty, right? 2:12 a.

m.

software detected a person on camera, but there was no actual video available.

Well, that’s very confusing.

And then we looked at this timeline and we all thought that’s just very confusing.

Then at 2:28 a.

m.

something a lot less confusing.

NY’s pacemaker app showed a disconnect from her phone.

Presumably the time when she is disconnected from her phone and maybe even from her home.

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The next morning, Nancy does not show up for church plans that she has with friends, and family members quickly came to check on her at 11:56 a.

m.

That time at the beginning was a mess, right? It was like an hour earlier, the sheriff told us.

And then everybody wondered, now why is the family in that home for an hour before calling 911? Well, they settled on 11:56 a.

m.

Family members come to check.

And then 12:03 p.

m.

7 minutes later, they call 911.

So, that makes a lot more sense.

You get there, “Mom, mom, where are you?” You see things, you wonder, “What the hell is this? I’ll get to what they saw.

” They run outside.

They wonder if she’s in the backyard.

Has she fallen? Is she out in the front street? Is she somewhere? And within 7 minutes, 911 help.

So, a police patrol arrives um what 13 minutes later, 12 minutes later at uh at 12:15 p.

m.

Okay.

From the beginning, law enforcement made very clear that they did not believe this was a case of an elderly woman just, you know, wandering off.

NY’s purse was still inside the house.

NY’s wallet was still inside the house.

NY’s cell phone was still inside the house.

NY’s vehicle was still inside the garage.

And the sheriff assured everybody that this was not a woman who didn’t have her wits about her.

They said she was sharp as attack, right? She was not somebody suffering from any kind of cognitive decline.

And then he added something else.

Gave you the physical picture of Nancy Guthrie and said that she wasn’t in the best health.

She could not walk more than about 50 yards on her own.

And then he brought down the hammer and said she needed very important medications and that without those med medications uh it could be fatal.

24 hours without those medications and it could be fatal for Nancy Guthrie.

So now she is separated from her home her medications and the clock is ticking.

So search and rescue efforts launched really hard and fast.

First, there were like canines and helicopters and drones and ground crews, and there were deputies everywhere.

But almost as quickly as the search effort started, that search came to a grinding halt.

On day two, day two, the Monday after the Sunday disappearance, the sheriff uh said this was no longer primarily a search mission.

He basically drew down on the search, said that part was kind of over and instead called this a crime scene.

He said that the air assets, the searchers, they would all step aside unless they were needed again.

Made a lot of us look a scance.

We were thinking, what? It’s been like 30 hours since since the report to 911.

Like that’s pretty quick to be calling off a search, right? Even if there’s a crime scene, like there still might be something around the house or, you know, out in the back in the desert brush or down the road or, I don’t know, in some of those drainage culverts or washes as they call them in Arizona.

But nope, sheriff seem to know something we didn’t know.

The decision has haunted this case ever since.

Couple reasons why.

First and foremost, the sheriff, well, I don’t know, a week or two later, would say, “Yeah, maybe that wasn’t what I should have done.

I’ll I’ll fall on the sword on that one.

My bad.

” My words, but effectively his message was, “Okay, maybe I made a mistake there.

” Uh, releasing the crime scene, calling off that search, doing that all so early.

You know, maybe that’s on me, right? But also, it signaled that the investigators saw something inside that house that pushed them away from a rescue mindset and toward something a lot more sinister.

They weren’t telling us, but they knew something.

Curiously, at the same time, the sheriff also publicly stated that roughly 30 hours after Nancy disappeared, there was no immediate danger to the community.

nothing for any of the neighbors to be concerned about.

That message is a hell of a cry from where the sheriff is today.

You know, seven plus weeks since this whole tragedy began that really changed.

I will get to that.

Everything in line.

The first major details about evidence in this case came out during uh the sheriff’s second press conference on day five.

And Sheriff Nanos confirmed that blood droplets that we had seen outside of NY’s front entrance and we’d only seen them because Brian Enton was able to walk up to the house cuz the sheriff released that scene on Monday and videotaped blood droplets at her front door.

We didn’t know whose blood, but the sheriff at that press conference on Thursday, day five, confirmed that that was NY’s blood.

Brian Anton wasn’t the only person who saw those blood droplets.

Michael Ruiz from Fox Digital also spotted that blood trail right after the sheriff released the home as a crime scene.

The sheriff would also eventually say other biological samples had been collected and were being processed.

And uh sources told me on day three, 2 days before that second press conference, day three, Tuesday, that at this scene, the back door had been left wide open, that there were signs of force entry.

The sheriff would not publicly confirm that.

And that same highlevel uh law enforcement source told me that there were multiple Nest cameras that had been smashed, that there was blood found inside the home, and that police had turned their attention towards NY’s son-in-law as a suspect.

And that same source also told me on day three that police had towed the car belonging to that man’s wife, NY’s daughter, and that the car was quote in evidence.

On day five, the sheriff confirmed that the car had indeed been towed, adding that it had been processed under a warrant.

And while he refused to confirm which door uh may have been used to gain entry to NY’s home, he did confirm that investigators did not have the front doorbell camera, that it was quote not in their possession.

And we would eventually learn that the camera was indeed a Nest cam, one among multiple Nest cams at Nazi’s home.

Also on day five, the sheriff refused to rule anyone out in their investigation.

In fact, the sheriff said everybody had to be looked at.

The Uber driver, the gardener, the pool person, everybody.

He emphasized that the family had been cooperative, but again he stopped short of a sweeping uh you know edict that everybody had been uh or that anybody had been you know swept off the table in those first days and in fact first weeks behind the scenes a so-called ransom letter was sent on day three to the national media outlet TMZ and also to two local TV stations in Tucson.

They also received copies.

And that ransom letter demanded $4 million in cryptocurrency with a threat that if that amount uh wasn’t received on a deadline, it would rise to 6 million after the deadline passed.

So, police said that one ransom communication contained details that appeared to match some of the known facts in the case, like references to things like an Apple Watch, where the Apple Watch was located in the room and in the house, and also a flood light that was smashed.

They took it seriously because of those things.

And I know what you’re thinking.

A lot of the video showed that the flood light was smashed, right? And a lot of us keep our Apple watches, you know, on our bedside table.

So, was that really such a good reference? Was that really so critical? Was that really something that should lead us to take those ransom letters seriously? Well, they did.

FBI and local law enforcement alike.

Here’s the problem, and it’s a critical problem.

There was no proof of life.

There was no established communication protocol.

There was no continued verified contact after that original letter came in.

But later more messages surfaced uh seemed a little different but they included one that demanded a single bitcoin which amounts to about tens of thousands of dollars and uh still later even more communications swapping out the kind of cryptocurrency being demanded.

Right? Kind of sounded like people were just piling on you know scammers from overseas the ones that have a I don’t know millions of dollars that a Nigerian prince wants to give you.

We just need your bank account number.

You know, in the middle of all of that chaos, federal prosecutors made a big announcement.

They charged a man in California, a guy named Derek Ka, Kala, however you pronounce Derrick’s name.

Dererick’s in a heap of trouble.

They accused him of sending fake ransom communications to the Guthrie family and then trying to profit from their agony.

This was one of the first concrete arrests connected to the case, but not because he had Nancy.

Because according to investigators, he was a fraud.

Just a fraud.

That case is coming up.

You wait.

Hope they have cameras in that courtroom, but it’s federal, so they won’t.

So, we’ll just have to get a sketch artist if it ever gets to court because this one I could really see being a settlement.

publicly.

Law enforcement never said that they believed those messages were authentic.

Even though in one of Savannah Guthri’s Instagram videos, she told the alleged ransom seeker that she would pay, but she wanted proof.

And that proof never came.

As the investigation continued, NY’s security cameras, those quickly became the biggest mysteries in this case.

Early on, the language was all over the place.

There were questions about whether the cameras had been removed or disconnected or smashed or tampered with or taken.

Right.

Sheriff said the cameras were quote removed.

Said the timeline reflected they were disconnected, but that over time investigators would try to recover whatever residual imagery they could from those systems given that Nancy did not have a subscription to a service that would save her Nest Cam videos.

And then later he came out to say can’t do it.

We went to the providers.

They can’t do it.

So sadly there’ll be nothing.

We we won’t get any video.

Well, watch this space.

In a moment you’ll find out why that was wrong and why we got what we got.

By Feb 5, law enforcement was openly acknowledging that investigators were digging into a series of digital trails.

They were looking at social media, bank activity, phone activity.

They were canvasing for surveillance footage all over the place, like going out two miles.

FBI agents visited a Chevron and a Circle K, those establishments located between NY’s home and her daughter Annie’s home.

But that same day, the sheriff said no suspect had been identified.

Uh that no one had been ruled out and that the family remained cooperative.

And still late at night, investigators went in to Nancy Guthri’s daughter’s home, Annie and Tomaso’s home, and as reporters were outside wondering what in the Dickens they were doing in there in the dark, they saw flashbulbs going off, photographs being taken for 3 hours.

They saw packages being taken out of the home and put into a uh law enforcement vehicle, mail being taken out of the uh the daughter’s mailbox, put into an envelope, taken away.

Lots of suspicion, neighbors of Annie and Tomaso being canvased, searches going on around the neighborhood of Annie and Tomaso’s home.

Reporters were getting very, very curious.

Then came one of the biggest bombshells in the entire case.

On February 10th, that’s 10 days after Nancy vanished.

The director of the FBI, Cash Patel, released some absolutely terrifying images from Nancy Guthri’s Nest Doorbell Cam.

I remember a friend of mine sending me the video and the image and saying, “Oh my god, Fargo.

” If you’ve seen the movie Fargo, you’ll know what I mean.

the terrifying image of the man with the three-hole bellaclava coming to kidnap um someone’s wife, right? It it it just looked like that.

It felt so frightening.

It showed the suspect, this intruder, right, fumbling outside of the front of NY’s home.

He appeared to be a man about 5’9, 5’10”, average build, wearing dark clothing, including this frightening threehole balaclava covering his face.

In several of the images, he could be seen carrying what was later identified as a black 25 L Ozark Trail hiker backpack.

Those are sold by Walmart.

Several images also appeared to show that he had a firearm, you know, crudely fixed in a holster right in the front in a strange place where most people don’t holster a gun.

But in another image, something very curious appeared.

what looked like the same person but appearing without the backpack and without the gun and holster.

And that immediately raised a lot of questions online about the sequence of the images and the timing and whether or not those images were even from the same date.

Right.

Investigators later uh reached out to and worked with Walmart and other retailers.

Obviously, they were trying to isolate who may have bought that Ozark Trail hiker backpack, but by early March, the sheriff was saying even the backpack may not have been purchased at Walmart.

Maybe it was secondhand.

Maybe just not a direct purchase from the store itself, right? Really deflating because it just seemed like such a good lead.

We have found so many people based on purchases and cameras on the, you know, the checkout lines.

Didn’t look like that was going to happen here.

And on the very same day that those haunting videos of the suspect were released, investigators also raided a family, their car, their home in Rio Rico, about an hour south of Tucson.

A man there was detained and questioned.

His home was tossed and searched.

parents taken out, everybody taken out and the operation was like massive.

It was was huge attention.

We were all following it live, right? But he was later released and the sheriff described him as a delivery person whose digital footprint had placed him quote in the area of NY’s home.

Um the sheriff also said more than one issue had led investigators to that man and he fit the bill right.

He was about the same height, build, had the goatee that you could kind of see under the bellaclava.

But it would not be long before the sheriff said he was satisfied with this man’s alibi.

So no arrest.

More importantly, no Nancy.

But then just 2 days later, Feb 12, activity intensifies again.

FBI agents are back at Nancy Guthri’s house overnight, right? And then in the morning, a white tent goes up over the front entrance at her front door.

And you know, reporters can zero in and they can see guys carrying high resolution camera equipment and a forensic height board.

All that is going into the white tent.

And this is also the time that Michael Ruiz of Fox Digital reports that when he had been on NY’s front entrance videotaping like Brian Anton had done, he witnessed small glass fragments on the ground at NY’s front entrance just below where the doorbell cam had been.

So, did this support the information that my source told me that cameras had been smashed? Good question.

Sheriff still won’t confirm it.

Eventually, that white tent came down.

couple of hours and those investigators disappeared.

But there was something missing.

The bracket, the bracket on the front door that had once held that nest cam, right? The nest cam was gone, but the bracket had still been up there.

And now suddenly it was gone, too.

So presumably taken by those investigators who were under the white tent, but weeks after Nancy had vanished.

Why now did they decide to take that bracket? Why didn’t that go the first day? If the homicide investigators were there and they saw blood at the front door, why didn’t you process a lot more at that front door and you saw that that Nest camera was gone? Glass fragments below.

Maybe it was smashed off, but what the hell? Why wouldn’t you take the bracket? And for the love of God, why wouldn’t you take the half moon welcome mat? It’s still there to my best of my knowledge.

Then police made a very broad request of NY’s neighbors.

They asked for doorbell camera video and surveillance camera video from all of the neighbors within a very wide range of dates and going out a couple miles.

First, they asked for anything um that could be seen on a doorbell camera on January 11th and anything that you may have witnessed with your own eyes.

Anything weird January 11th? And we were all trying to figure out why January 11th.

get to that in a minute.

Then police began to broaden their request of the neighbors and they asked for all of their video and anything that might have been weird that they might see on their videos between January the 1st all the way through February the 2nd, like a whole month.

And then they began to revisit all the neighbors homes and ask more questions, looking beyond just the hours of the abduction itself.

And then came the gloves.

The story of the gloves, that one took days out of our lives.

Pair of gloves was found roughly two miles from NY’s home, side of the road.

And this became one of the most important pieces of evidence in the case, it seemed at the time.

And soon investigators uh developed an unknown male DNA profile from those gloves.

Why did we care about those gloves on the side of the road? Well, for one, they resembled the pair of gloves that was seen on the suspect in the doorbell footage.

So, that profile was put into KOTUS.

That’s the national DNA database uh that basically looks at all offenders whose DNA uh profiles have been uploaded so that anytime they commit a crime in the future, we we can find them if we have their DNA.

But on this case, sadly, there was no match.

So, whoever had been wearing those gloves and inserting his DNA into the fingers, etc.

, uh, he wasn’t the criminal.

He wasn’t a criminal, according to Cotus, and he certainly wasn’t the criminal that they were looking for, uh, at the Nancy Guthrie home.

And how did they know about the Nancy Guthrie home and a criminal in there? Because they had actually found unknown male DNA inside that home as well.

And the gloves didn’t match that either.

So, there were other reports, right, that had come in that a pair of gloves had been found inside Nancy Guthri’s house.

And oh my god, that was kind of earthshattering, but it was wrong, unfortunately.

And Sheriff Nanos later had to clarify that that report was just wrong.

There were no gloves found inside NY’s home.

As for the DNA found inside the house, well, that was a little bit more tricky.

um it was male DNA that did not match with anyone inside NY’s close circle.

Um and that would have to be tested.

So off it went to a Florida lab and the Florida lab um would take some time and determine that this is a mix.

It’s not really easy.

It’s kind of a partial profile.

So it can’t be sent to Cotus.

Cotus only takes a full profile.

And so here’s what I’m thinking as we speak right now.

They’re still working on that partial profile and perhaps they’re working through the potential for uh genetic genealogy um investigative genetic genealogy to find somebody find somebody out there.

Right? In the Cobberger case, because here we are, day 47, the day they arrested Brian Coberger, they had a really shitty little profile from the snap on the KBAR knife sheath that was left behind at the at the crime scene.

And they took that crappy little profile and they were able to build it out.

Right.

Cotus wasn’t any help.

First of all, he wasn’t a criminal and well that we know of.

And second of all, it was too small.

It was like a really, really imperfect profile.

But um the Oram lab down in Texas was able to build that profile out and investigative genetic genealogy led to Brian Cobberger in 47 days.

This is what I think might be going on now.

Yeah, we’re at 47 days, but patience is a virtue, I hope, in this case.

The sheriff also said more than a dozen different gloves had been found uh in the area just surrounding NY’s home, but that many of them likely belonged to searchers, which made a lot of people crazy because why would searchers be dropping their effing gloves, right? Just complicates the matters for people later on who go out searching because there’s been search after search with pauses and, you know, reignitions and all the rest.

So very frustrating that the whole glove story in the Nancy Guthrie case and it occupied several weeks of our attention but ultimately it really just didn’t lead anywhere.

And then on Feb 13 blockbuster late at night the case erupted again a major SWAT style operation operation number two.

Right this time it was a home that was located at Orange Grove and First Avenue.

home was raided.

This wasn’t far from NY’s home, right? As the crow flies, I think like about a mile or so.

But, uh, multiple people were detained, including, um, a mom in the home and then her son who was actually out, uh, driving a silver Range Rover um, to the nearby Culver’s restaurant where they grabbed him in the parking lot and cuffed him and questioned him in that parking lot.

He was the target.

A law enforcement told me that police had actually been surveilling him from the air from a plane for quite some time before the raid, but that at the moment he left his mom’s home to go for food, they thought, “Perfect time.

Move in.

” And move in they did.

Like, holy friies.

This thing was massive.

There were dozens and dozens of SWAT cars and the bomb squad and like trucks and vehicles from the FBI and from the sheriff’s department.

Dozens and dozens of these vehicles.

The entire neighborhood was shut down.

People couldn’t get into their homes or out.

I think most people who were covering the story really believed this must be it.

I mean, the amount of firepower they brought in really looked like they had something very dangerous and very, very real.

And then they’ve got this guy in cuffs.

They’ve got his silver Range Rover that he was driving, right? And they’re looking, they’re they’re photographing the Range Rover while he’s in cuffs in another vehicle and they’re uh searching his mother’s home and they pulled her out to the neighbor’s home and something really weird happened that made all of us watching live think, “Oh my god, maybe there’s a body in that Range Rover.

” They wouldn’t let the press get anywhere near, but all the investigators were photographing every aspect of the silver Range Rover through the windows and all the rest.

It looked very dirty.

The the car looked very dirty, but they decided to pop the back uh you know, trunk.

They decided to pop the the uh pop it open.

But they didn’t just do that.

They actually put up privacy screens on either side so that the press could not see what was inside the vehicle when they opened the back hatch.

And in all my days of doing this, privacy screens are typically for one thing cuz there’s a body and you want to offer dignity to the body.

Yeah.

And so we many of us assumed, oh my god, there’s a body in that Range Rover.

This all has to do with the Nancy Guthrie case.

This is horrifying.

And then they put yellow paper over the license plate.

They loaded that thing up on a flatbed truck and they uh and they put they put it on the flatbed and then the police towed it away.

But this guy, this guy, um, my source said was targeted for this raid and for this questioning and for being detained because he had a criminal background in trafficking and that there was a very, very specific tip that led police to him at that home.

again the Range Rover he’s driving uh they thought at the time it had something to do with the trafficking that he used to do or still does.

Don’t know.

Um but it was shielded from view.

We just never saw what was inside it.

Right.

And in the morning for those who stayed up till 4:00 a.

m.

and couldn’t couldn’t stay up any longer, they wondered if they’d wake up to NY’s case being solved.

But that was not the case in the morning.

The news was really just disheartening, I guess.

No arrests, no sign of Nancy.

The raid was a bust.

And weeks later, the people who were connected to that raid, the mom who had her house searched, the guy who was in the silver Range Rover who was yanked off and put in cuffs and thrown in a car and questioned, right? Detained.

Weeks later, the people who were connected to that raid, the mom whose house was raided, her son who was picked up at the the Culver’s restaurant parking lot, his Range Rover towed off, um they had been under so much public scrutiny.

They had been publicly assailed online.

People accusing them of doing awful things even though there was absolutely no evidence or sourced information that that that said they were connected other than there was a raid that produced nothing.

Yeah.

It was so bad um that they publicly announced they had no link to Nancy Guthrie.

That they like us felt horrible for her and wanted the best for her and wanted her to be found.

They had no idea why the police landed on their doorstep and questioned them.

By midFebruary, the public learned that the investigation now um had gone very high-tech.

Detectives confirmed that they were using something called a signal sniffer in an effort to try to find NY’s pacemaker.

Because a pacemaker will continue to send out a signal, right? It’s basically reaching out for its its connection.

And NY’s was connected to her her iPhone.

So when it gets separated, the pacemaker continues to look for the iPhone, sending out a hello and waiting for a handshake, you know.

So the signal sniffer was going out to see if it could send a handshake down to find that specific address of that pacemaker because alive or dead, god forbid, but that pacemaker would still be taken.

it would still be working for years.

So, um it’s something called blue fi bluefly Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signal detection the technology and it’s from Parsons Corporation and that TAC was used during helicopter and ground search operations beginning in early Feb.

And it’s good like it can detect electronic signals from like 800 to 1,000 feet away.

So yeah, flying around looking for that handshake, sending out a hello and waiting for an answer from the pacemaker.

To our knowledge, there’s just been nothing, right? They didn’t have any success.

At the same time, FBI investigators were out there on foot canvasing the local gun stores all around Tucson.

And in some cases, they carried with them long lists of names and and pictures.

Some reports said up to 40 names and photographs.

And the store owners and the workers in those gun stores reported to the press interviews saying that the agents had asked them if anybody with those names or resembling those photos had been in the store or had tried to purchase any weapons from the store.

And sadly, none of those folks could say that they recognized any of the names.

And as much as they wanted to help, um the pictures and the names did just didn’t help and they couldn’t come up with any answers there.

Um, and what’s frustrating here is that when the sheriff was asked about that, uh, he said to the reporter who asked, “Well, that’s a lie.

Those agents haven’t been out doing that in those gun stores.

” Well, it had already happened and the press had already seen it happening.

So, kafa.

Then, Mexico came laser focus into the story.

Right.

Early in the investigation, the sheriff had publicly said that they had no evidence that Nancy had been taken south of the border.

But then later, the feds, federal law enforcement sources told reporters, several different reporters with several distant sources that the FBI had in fact been in contact with their Mexican counterparts to ask about help in this investigation.

So Brian Anton uh went across the border into Mexico and he found that most folks in that Mexican border town of Ngalas had not even heard of the case and had not even heard of Nancy Guthrie.

It was just a whole other world over the border.

And the attorney general there publicly said their office had received no formal request to help and investigate this case.

And no information suggested that Nancy was there.

They said that they’d spoken to their federal authorities from that province in Mexico.

They’d gone to the feds and asked about it.

They they said they’d had no discussions, you know, from the provincial level with the American authorities.

So maybe it was a question of the federal authorities in Mexico.

Maybe they’d spoken with the federal authorities in the US, but it didn’t seem that the provincial authorities were part of any of that.

That was their message to us anyway.

So, even the the Mexico angle of the Nancy Guthrie case became another example of the case having public contradictions and partial disclosures and a lot of uncertainty.

In the first few weeks of this case, the sheriff announced that there were upwards of 400 different people involved in this investigation, both local and federal, right? Put them all together.

Uh whether they’re foot patrols or administrators or, you know, lab, whatever it is, there were over 400 people who were working in that case.

And that there were more than 40,000 tips that had come in at one point at the apex of this case.

both the FBI and the locals, local sheriff, they had received more than 40,000 tips.

But as the case moved into late February and early March, that posture changed and the numbers really fell away fast.

The resources were refocused into a smaller but dedicated task force.

We’re told that was made up of about five Puma County homicide detectives and then a smattering of FBI agents and that this task force would be working out of the FBI office in Tucson.

But before that, we’d heard that the majority of the FBI presence in Tucson had already, you know, withdrawn back to the headquarters in Phoenix, but that there would be a presence, a footprint in Tucson.

So that’s what we’re left to believe that this footprint, I don’t know how many people that is, uh, you know, tag teamed up with the five or so homicide investigators.

And so that leaves us to think that maybe there’s a dozen or so in this task force working out of the FBI office in Tucson.

It’s a far cry from 400, right? patrol presence remained in the neighborhood of Nancy Guthri’s home, but this was very clearly a brand new phase of this investigation.

And these things happen, right? Like in my line of work, I watch this all the time.

There’s a flurry of activity and the natural progression of that is that it begins to atrophy.

It has to.

There’s other crimes to solve.

The resources are needed elsewhere, too.

And so eventually things shrink and that seems to be what’s happened in this case.

And then the sheriff did something that would alter the way the media would and could even cover this case.

The sheriff forced an egregious parking restriction for hundreds of yards around NY’s home.

went out for many blocks all the way around NY’s home, prohibiting anyone from parking for hundreds of yards.

Now, you might not think that means much, but let’s not forget this is the desert.

I think one temperature that I clocked in the middle of all this was 87° in the dry, hot, dusty streets all around NY’s desert home.

And what this effectively meant was that any media crews could no longer have their transmission equipment or their trucks or their power sources, you know, near them as they did their work.

They could not have their vehicles to seek shelter from the blazing hot desert sun.

They couldn’t charge their phones or their equipment with their vehicles.

They couldn’t have adequate food or water without hiking in heavy loads of supplies and hiking in a tent and setting it up just to sit under it all day in that heat.

That makes it very very hard to do that job.

And almost overnight, hundreds of members of the media vanished, just disappeared.

So, thanks, Sheriff.

Way to go.

What a way to keep the story alive and get those tips, you know, continuing to come in.

were only a handful of dedicated reporters in this case and journalists and streamers who decided uh that they were dedicated enough to finding Nancy Guthrie uh that they would remain in that situation, hot hellish situation with no Wi-Fi and no support, right? Brian Enton stayed.

Michael Ruiz of Fox Digital stayed.

A live streamer named JLR stayed.

But pretty much everybody else vamooshed, right? And around the same time, uh, Nancy Guthri’s family emerged.

This was a moment that was pretty like I don’t know what the word is, but it was like overwhelming.

It was very emotional, was extraordinarily sad.

The family, including Savannah, her sister Annie, Annie’s husband, Tomaso, uh the three of them, arm- in-armm, publicly came out of the house and visited uh the yellow flower memorial that had been building at the foot of NY’s driveway and they walked very very slowly.

Um captured by only a couple of the people who were still there to to videotape this, including Brian Enton.

Um, and Annie could be heard crying audibly as she and her husband and her sister uh put their flowers down on this memorial and also left a card that was addressed to mama saying that their hearts were broken and that their love still burned bright.

And then just days later, Savannah returned to New York and briefly returned to the studio that uh hosts the Today Show and told her colleagues off camera while giving them lots of hugs that photographers were able to sort of capture from the outside window.

She told them that she was still standing and that she was still hopeful and that she was still trying to find a way back, whatever that way would look like.

But even as the investigation narrowed operationally, investigators were still out there and could still be seen by Brian Enton and Michael Ruiz and JLR working in the neighborhood.

In early March, FBI agents and violent crime task force personnel were back out again canvasing doortodoor.

And the news was finally released that one of the gloves that was found near NY’s home um eventually traced back through DNA to a local restaurant employee.

And according to the sheriff, that employee had nothing to do with any of this.

Was not part of the investigation.

It just seemed like every moment you think something might yield, I don’t know, a good lead that might take you to a resolution, it just halted and it was dashed.

One development after the other dashed.

Right.

Then in um late and unsettling development, investigators began looking into the possibility that there was a very weird internet outage or other electrical disruption.

The very night that Nancy was taken, right around the same time, Sheriff Nanos confirmed that investigators were looking into a timeline in which NY’s neighbors Wi-Fi went out and power was disrupted again right around the time she vanished.

One neighbor that lives within eyesight of NY’s home even reported that their dog was behaving in an agitated way in the middle of the night.

Something that was very uncharacteristic.

And I should tell you that every time that we heard investigators were out canvasing neighbors, the neighbors weren’t always talking to the press.

But after about five weeks or so, six weeks, they started to.

And some of those neighbors told the police that investigators asked them specifically about January 11th.

So, one thing I can tell you about these investigators returning over and over again.

We never really knew what it was that brought them out over and over again.

But Brian Anton reported that neighbors finally said to him that investigators actually were asking about January 24th as well.

That’s a week before Nancy vanished.

January 24th, they were being asked, “Did you see anything? Have you seen anything? Is there something odd that happened on that day?” Very specific.

A week before Nancy vanished.

And that would be like the Saturday Sunday, right? January 24th is right there in the middle of the weekend.

So that’s interesting.

Then Michael Ruiz from Fox Digital reported that two law enforcement sources told him that January 11th was a specific date that investigators were asking those neighbors about because January 11th, they said, was the date of the photograph that we’ve seen of the suspect on the back porch not wearing the backpack, not wearing the gun.

Many of our sources told us that that picture was taken at a different date than the other pictures where he’s wearing the backpack and the gun, the video, but we didn’t know what date.

We didn’t even know if maybe it might be just a few hours earlier.

So, the date before.

But now, Michael Ruiz says two law enforcement sources says this was this was January 11th.

this image of the stalker, of the suspect two weeks before the disappearance.

That’s the image that Ruiz’s sources say um was taken on that day.

So, put it together now, January 11th, 2 weeks before Nancy disappears on the weekend.

Um that’s when the image, according to Ruiz’s sources, is taken of him without the backpack, without the gun.

January 24th, one week later and now one week away from the abduction again on the weekend.

Uh investigators are out canvasing the neighborhood and asking about January 24th.

Did you see anything weird on January 24th? Which makes you wonder if this monster was casing her weekend after weekend to see what her Saturday night pattern, Sunday morning pattern was.

And now, six weeks into the case, investigators have reportedly recovered new thumbnail images from multiple motionactivated cameras that were stationed around NY’s home, right? Including cameras pointed at the pool, backyard, sideyard, and all three property cameras, including that front, and uh the driveway.

But investigators said that the images they got perhaps from the scratching process that the FBI said that they were working with Google to to effectuate like the scratching process scratches the video like an onion peel from the backend servers.

The scratching process yielded the horrifying video and images we saw at the front door.

But maybe the scratching process yielded these pictures too.

But the investigators say sadly they just don’t show anything that’s currently considered suspicious and that these images didn’t capture the critical hours when Nancy disappeared.

So even that recovery while you know significant it didn’t deliver the breakthrough that yet again we’ve all been waiting for which brings us to where uh things stand now right no suspect publicly identified no suspect vehicle publicly identified no confirmed proof of life publicly released no code match publicly announced.

And yet, astoundingly, 40 plus days into this case, the sheriff announced that he believes they know why this happened and that it was targeted and that the person responsible could indeed strike again.

Let me read you his exact words.

quote, “We believe, we know why he was here and have known since day one.

” Let me read that again.

We believe we know why he was here and have known since day one.

Which makes you wonder why then on day one did he search Annie Guthri’s car and then her home and impound that car for more than 40 days? Why on day two did he say there was no threat to the community? And why on day three did he take the alleged ransom seekers so seriously? Really, what it makes you wonder is, were there serious errors made in those early days that may impede the investigator’s ability to track down the real guy, the real person who took Nancy? Looking ahead, the sheriff says the mixed DNA sample found inside the home could still lead them to a suspect, even as sources say there isn’t one person on their radar today.

Not even one suspect.

And even though my source says there isn’t enough evidence to scrape together to even get a search warrant, not enough to even get probable cause.

Again, that source saying don’t expect any raids anytime soon.

He told me that a few weeks ago and that’s played out till today.

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