Nearly four months after Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Arizona home, investigators have still not publicly named a suspect or a motive, even as the case has drawn more than 50,000 tips and a federal review of forensic evidence.
That leaves Savannah Guthrie’s family waiting for the first public break in a case that has consumed the Pima County sheriff’s department and the FBI. Guthrie, 84, 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. She was reported missing around noon the next day after she did not appear at a friend’s house to watch an online church service.
Former FBI special agent Harry Trombitas said the volume of public response alone shows how much investigators have to sort through. He said there had been over 50,000 tips and that the names of the people involved were likely buried somewhere in them, but that investigators still had to work through each lead with an eye toward future prosecution. In his view, mixed DNA is harder to handle, which is why the evidence in the case has moved from a private lab in Florida to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Va., for advanced analysis.
Authorities have also been reviewing doorbell camera footage that showed a masked person the FBI said was armed, along with video of a speeding car around the time of the disappearance, a backpack that may have been bought online and a damaged utility box that could be tied to an internet outage near the home. Investigators have processed mixed DNA, including a hair sample recovered from Guthrie’s home, but the public record still stops short of a named suspect. Sheriff Chris Nanos has said investigators believe they know why the home was targeted, while also acknowledging that no suspect or motive has been publicly identified.
At least three people have been detained for questioning, but none has been publicly identified as responsible. On May 11, as the case reached 100 days, Nanos said he believed an arrest would eventually be made and said investigators were not going to give up just because the calendar had turned. For Guthrie’s family, and for the public following one of the region’s highest-profile missing-person cases, the central fact remains unchanged: the work has been exhaustive, but the name of the person behind it is still unknown.
