Elizabeth Smart says there is still reason to hope for Nancy Guthrie, even after more than 170 days without answers. Smart said there is no body, and that alone means the case should not be treated as closed.
Her comments landed as she promotes The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart, a new podcast set to debut Aug. 17 on iHeartRadio. Smart has spent years speaking publicly about survival after she was kidnapped and held captive for nine months as a teenager in 2002, and she said the new project is meant to center resilience, hope and the inner strength it takes to keep going when everything is against survivors.
The search for Guthrie remains focused on facts that have already shaken the family. Nancy Guthrie was last seen at her Arizona home on the night of Jan. 31, her family reported her missing the following day, and police believed she was abducted overnight after surveillance footage showed a masked individual at her door. That is why Smart’s view matters now: she is not arguing that there is no danger, but that danger does not erase the possibility of life.
Smart said investigators may know more than the public does, and she urged anyone with information, even a small detail, to speak up. She also asked people to give the Guthrie family compassion and grace. In her words, there is still reason to hope because there is no body, and she said people should not give up until Nancy is found.
That faith sits beside a hard fact. Police have already treated the disappearance as an abduction, yet no public update has resolved what happened after the masked person appeared at the door. In cases like this, the gap between what investigators know and what the public sees can be the difference between a lead and a breakthrough.
For Smart, the message is both practical and personal. She said hearing survivor stories from the victim’s perspective can make the true crime genre make more sense, and that she wants people to come away with more compassion and humanity. The unanswered question now is not whether the case matters; it is what investigators know that the public still does not, and whether someone who has stayed silent so far will finally report what they saw.
