Investigators are urging residents to provide home surveillance footage from certain dates prior to Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, as they sift through thousands of tips in their effort to solve the case of the missing mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, as reported by Associated Press.
As of Thursday, it remained unclear how far the investigation had progressed. Newly released images showing a masked individual on Nancy Guthrie’s porch the night she vanished, along with heightened police activity across Arizona and the brief detention of a suspect, had fueled speculation of a significant breakthrough.
However, the man was later released after questioning.
On Wednesday, FBI agents carrying water bottles to beat the 80-degree Fahrenheit (27-degree Celsius) heat walked among rocks and desert vegetation at Guthrie’s Tucson-area home. They also fanned out across a neighborhood about a mile (1.6 kilometers) away, knocking on doors and searching through cactuses, brush and boulders, AP reported.
Here’s what neighbors asked
“They were just asking some general questions wondering if there was anything, any information we could shed on the Nancy Guthrie issue. Wanted to look around the property and after that, cameras and such,” Ann Adams, a neighbor of Nancy Guthrie’s other daughter, Annie Guthrie, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Annie Guthrie lives several miles away from her mother.
“They did ask specifically for the 31st of January and the morning of the first of February and then they wanted to know if we saw anything suspicious on cameras since then,” Adams said.
Authorities have said Guthrie, 84, was taken against her will. She’s been missing since Feb. 1. DNA tests showed blood on her porch was hers, and authorities say she takes several medications and there’s concern she could die without them.
News stations in Tucson also reported Wednesday that people with Ring doorbell cameras in the area got an alert saying investigators are requesting footage from Jan. 11 between 9 pm and midnight regarding the Guthrie case. That’s nearly three weeks before Guthrie went missing.
Ring allows local public safety agencies to submit requests to users in the community that appear publicly on the “Neighbors” feed, according to the Ring website. Users in a designated area receive a notification.
The stations also reported that a pair of black gloves were recovered during agents’ search and have been submitted for DNA analysis.
Several hundred detectives and agents are now assigned to the investigation, which is expanding in the area, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said.
On Wednesday, two investigators were seen leaving Annie Guthrie’s home carrying a paper grocery bag and a white trash bag. One of them, still wearing blue protective gloves, also collected a stack of mail from the roadside mailbox. They departed without comment to reporters, AP reported.
Adams, the neighbor, said she was out walking her dog earlier this week when, “it started to get really busy and then I heard about them searching, looked down the street, I saw them slowly moving this way.”
In the first significant break in the case, the FBI released black-and-white images and videos showing what the agency said was “an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera at Nancy Guthrie’s front door the morning of her disappearance.” But the images did not show what happened to her, AP reported.
FBI Director Kash Patel stated that investigators spent several days attempting to recover lost, corrupted, or inaccessible images.
Although the footage does not reveal the individual’s face, authorities remain hopeful that someone may recognize who was on the porch. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department reported receiving over 4,000 calls to its tip line within the past 24 hours.
