How Did Nancy Guthrie Vanish Without a Trace?

**Savannah Guthrie** (0:05)
I'm coming on today with a very specific message. It has been months since our mom was taken from us.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:15)
Savannah Guthrie, co-host of The Today Show, posted this message on Instagram last week about her mother, Nancy.

**Savannah Guthrie** (0:22)
Our family is in agony.
We are in a nightmare that will not end. Nothing about our situation has changed.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:31)
Nancy Guthrie was taken six months ago this past weekend. There have been no charges or credible leads in months.

**Savannah Guthrie** (0:39)
And we will never stop looking for her. We will always ache for her and feel that hole in our hearts.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (0:48)
This has been such a big story in American life, but can we just try to make sense of what happened here and answer this core question, how can someone disappear without a trace?

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:02)
That's our colleague, Valerie Bauerlein.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (1:04)
How could this happen in this time of digital surveillance, where every move we make is recorded? How could we not know where she is?

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:15)
Valerie has been working with a team in the newsroom to try to figure out why the Guthrie case has been so hard to crack.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (1:23)
We've spent months digging in on the case, trying to find out everything that we could, building immense timelines just to see beat by beat what was going on at key moments. We interviewed just dozens of people, lots of FOIA requests of personnel files and police records, lots of current and former investigators in the case, and as many people as we could.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:50)
If you could boil it down, what is it the root of why Nancy Guthrie hasn't been found?

**Valerie Bauerlein** (1:58)
It's not just one factor.
It was a perfect storm of factors, and in my mind, I thought about it in three ways. Bad luck, bad calls, and bad blood.

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:12)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, August 3rd.
Coming up on the show, why has one of the highest profile criminal investigations in the country.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:41)
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**Jessica Mendoza** (3:20)
Nancy Guthrie's home is in Pima County, Arizona, on the edge of Tucson. It's a vast landscape, dusty, and spiked with saguaro cacti.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (3:30)
One of the shocking things to me about visiting there, I live in North Carolina. I've grown up in the South.
It is so vast. It's like 9,000 square miles. It takes three hours to drive across Pima County, that area, and only 400 square miles of that 9,000 is developed. The rest of it is desert.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:52)
On Saturday, January 31st, Nancy Guthrie had dinner with the family of her older daughter, Annie. Afterward, her son-in-law drove her home.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (4:02)
He watched her go in the garage and watched the garage door shut at 9.48, 9:50 p.m. And so that's the last time anyone sees her alive.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:13)
The next morning, Guthrie was supposed to meet a friend, but she never showed up.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (4:18)
So, Annie went over to her mom's house and found things that immediately set off alarm bells. And, you know, the family has said later that the back doors were propped open.
Nancy Guthrie's iPhone and purse were there. And they realized pretty quickly that a lot of things were awry and immediately called 911 to say, our mother's missing and we don't know what's going on here. And that was at roughly 12 o'clock.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:47)
On Sunday.

**Valerie Bauerlein** (4:48)
Local time on Sunday.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:52)
Let's take a moment here, Val. Can you just tell us a little bit more about Nancy Guthrie?
Who is she?

**Valerie Bauerlein** (4:58)
She grew up in a small town in Kentucky and went to the University of Kentucky and studied journalism and married a man that she met there. He was a mining engineer and they traveled all around the world as they started their family.
And they were living actually in Australia when the youngest of their three kids, Savannah, was born in the early 1970s. And they decided, well, now it's time that we put down roots, and they decided on Tucson.