Eleven days after the mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie vanished from her home in the foothills outside Tucson, Arizona, investigators had yet to identify a suspect or even a person of interest Wednesday.
What seemed like a major break Tuesday — when authorities detained a person for questioning — fizzled when the man was released hours later. The detainment followed another potential break earlier in the day when investigators released video footage showing a masked and apparently armed man at Nancy Guthrie’s doorstep the night of her disappearance.
The overall lack of progress has generated pressure and questions for local and federal investigators who haven’t held a news conference in days. From the outside, it might seem like solving the case and finding the 84-year-old Guthrie is growing unlikely, but investigators may be further along than they let on.
It’s not uncommon for cases to seem dead in the water at the outset and still eventually get solved, said Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former FBI profiler who worked on the yearslong search for the “Unabomber.”
Surveillance footage released Tuesday showed a person on Guthrie’s porch wearing a ski mask, backpack and what looked like a holstered handgun. It offered the best opportunity yet for the public to help identify the suspect, said O’Toole, thinking back to the hunt for Ted Kaczynski, known as the “Unabomber,” who was caught in 1996 after a yearslong search.
Kaczynski, who carried out a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, wrote a manifesto that was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post before he was caught.
In Guthrie’s case, the release of the surveillance footage and Savannah Guthrie’s plea for the public’s help is the same strategy, O’Toole said. Someone who knows the suspect may have noticed them acting unusual, such as not going to work, following the news closely, or making offhand comments about the case.
Investigators said DNA from blood on Guthrie’s porch matched her, and O’Toole said they will still be casing the area for DNA from a possible suspect, including hair or fingerprints, which have helped solve other cases.
Bryan Kohberger, the criminology student who sneaked into a home and stabbed four University of Idaho students to death in 2022, was arrested after trace DNA was found on a knife sheath left on one of the victim’s bed.
It’s unclear if any potential tipsters will step forward, but the hope remains that someone can help lead investigators closer to finding Nancy Guthrie.
