Did Two Agencies Stop Talking Over Nancy Guthrie's Case?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
I want to do something on this show that we haven't done on the Nancy Guthrie case yet. We're going to be walking through the entire thing, from the night Nancy disappeared, all the way to where this investigation stands, in one piece, the whole timeline, every event, every development, every piece of evidence, every news beat, every chapter. And here's why I want to do this. The case is so much going on. So many separate developments, so many side stories, so many days it felt like turning points. And I think a lot of people, even people who've been following this case closely on this show, have started to lose the thread. Where are we? What actually happened? What did the agencies do? What did they not do? What's been reported? What's been disputed? What's still open? So, you and I are going back to the start beginning to now. So we can all see it together. We can build our own picture of where the case actually stands in your head with all the pieces in front of you. So that when the next development drops, and it will, you've got a full picture to weigh it against, a fresh picture.
All there, all laid out in one piece. Like only time can give us perspective. Your thoughts as we work through this in the comment section on Substack and YouTube, links are in the description. I'd love for you to weigh in. So here's what I want to be straight up about right up front. I'm not going to tell you what to think about any of this. I'm just going to walk you through every piece in order. There are sides on this case and theories and disputed facts and people I respect who read the same evidence in completely different ways. And I'm going to lay it out. You take it from there. Okay? This isn't going to be a here's what Tony thinks piece. Maybe I'll throw a little conjecture in there, but I will let you know when I do. Before we go back, here's where we are right now, because I think you need to feel where this case has landed before we walk through how it got here. Outside of the newsroom in Tucson, the KVOA TV station, there's a big banner, Nancy's face is on it. Three words are underneath, bring her home. Around the photo, there's hundreds of handwritten notes from strangers, people who never met Nancy, people who drove from Phoenix just to write something down and pin it up. The banner went up in the days after she vanished, and it's still there. The cameras that surrounded her house in February, I mean a lot of them are gone. Reporters, gone. The country, the way the country always does, moved on. The banner didn't. Four months in, that's where the case visually sits. A banner, notes from strangers, a missing 84-year-old grandmother whose name is still on the FBI's Seeking Information page. That is the picture. Let me walk you through how we got here. First, Nancy, because before this is a timeline, she is a person. And I want you to keep her in your head every step of the way through what we're about to walk through. Nancy's 84, mother of three, one of them is Savannah Guthrie. Yes, obviously from The Today Show. Before she was anybody's mother on television, Nancy raised a son with Down syndrome who outlived every prediction the doctors gave her. She had been a fixture of her Catalina Foothills neighborhood in Tucson for decades, had a presence that pulled hundreds of people into a single church to pray for her when she disappeared. Nancy has a pacemaker, she has medication since she takes every single day for her heart, she has a hearing aid and she takes it out at night. All three were left inside her house the night she was taken. Whoever was on her porch took Nancy and left the rest behind. That detail is when a lot of people in this case keep coming back to. I'll let that sit there too.
So let me start with a start. Saturday, January 31st, Nancy takes an uber to her daughter Annie's house for dinner. A normal Saturday for a woman in her 80s, around 9:48 p.m., a family member drives her home, garage opens, garage closes.
Then come the three timestamps. The case has been built around 1:47 a.m., Nancy's doorbell camera disconnects 2:12 a.m., the camera registers motion, it can't save, 2:28 a.m., her pacemaker app disconnects from her phone. 41 minutes, that's the window between those anchor points. By the time her congregation noticed she wasn't in her pew or virtual pew if you will, the next morning that window was already 8 hours closed. Now the response. Parishioners alert the family Sunday afternoon. The Sheriff's Department is at the house by Sunday night and by Wednesday Savannah and her siblings record their first video plea. Three adult children trying to keep their voices steady on camera, asking whoever has their mother to bring her home. Thursday, the FBI announces a $50,000 reward and inside Nancy's home, deputies find what looked like a crime scene. Nancy's blood, confirmed later by DNA, on her own porch. The doorbell camera that was screwed into the wall, gone. Her phone, her wallet and her medication still inside. And the country reacts. The tip line gets buried almost immediately inside the first 24 hours after authorities go public. More than 4,000 calls come in. Two weeks in, the FBI is working through more than 18,000 tips. And by the end of February, more than 30,000. People want to help. The country wants to help. How the local agency processed that volume, that's been part of the conversation around this case ever since. That same week, the opportunists show up. And I want to deal with these people right here, in this part of the timeline. So they're set aside, and we keep moving. A 42 year old man in Hawthorne, California, named Derek Kaleila allegedly texts Nancy's daughter and son-in-law from a virtual phone number demanding Bitcoin. The FBI traces him through his email and IP address inside a week. He's arrested, charged federally, released on a 20 grand bond. And he has a federal date now in Tucson. At the same time, TMZ starts receiving messages from somebody else claiming inside knowledge of who took Nancy. Both the FBI and the family's representatives have publicly characterized these communications as separate from the actual investigation. Kaleila is presumed innocent until his trial concludes. Whoever wrote those messages to TMZ has not, by any official statement, made public, been linked to whoever was on Nancy's porch.