Nancy Guthrie: A Caller Described Her Clothes and Said Dig Here

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:06)
The call came on Mother's Day. Not last week, not when every outland of the country started running the headline, the anonymous call to a volunteer search group in Nogales, Sonora, came on May 10th, Mother's Day. From a man who wouldn't give his name to a group of women who spend their weekends digging the dead out of unmarked desert graves. He told them the most famous missing mother in America was buried in an arrow in the Mariposa district west of Nogales near the border strip with Arizona. He gave landmarks. He described clothing. He said, go look. So they did. Fifteen volunteeriously shovels went out on May 16th. They did not find Nancy.
And then the man called back and he gave new directions. They went out again on June 10th. They did not find Nancy Guthrie. And then El Impractical published a story. The New York Post picked it up. And suddenly every national outlet in the country was running some version of the same breathless headline. Nancy Guthrie's body may be in Mexico, but there is something in this story the headlines are burying. Something about what those volunteers actually found in that ground. And it changes what the story is really about.
And we'll get there. Stay with me. Be sure to press subscribe as we continue to work our way through this. And I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section. First, I need to correct the timeline because the way this has been reported is genuinely a bit misleading. The national coverage compressed a month old tip that had already failed twice into what sounds like a breathtaking development. It's not. Here's what actually happened. May 10th, anonymous call to the Buscando Corazones Nogales. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. I'm sure I am. A volunteer collective that searches for the missing in Sonora. The caller believed to be a man, says Nancy Guthrie, is buried in the Mariposa area in a grave near a stream. May 16th, first search, up to 15 volunteers, the area described by the caller. Nothing found. The caller reaches back out with redefined directions, new information, a different spot of the same region. June 10th, the second search, nothing. The third search, there we go, scheduled for June 16th. Then on June 11th, we got that publication from El Imparcial. The post then runs the story, gets picked up at another newspaper, and then the national chain reaction starts. That's how we're here. That's how we're talking about, is Nancy Guthrie in Mexico? That's the timeline. And I want to be clear about the group involved, because they're not the problem here.
Buscando Corazones Nogales, led by Romana Guadalupe Elia Ortiz, does real and dangerous work. They operate in cartel territory. They search for the missing when nobody else will. Their credibility isn't the question here. They received a tip and they did what they do. They wouldn't look. That is not reckless. That's what they exist to do. I mean, thank goodness.
But look at the law enforcement posture around this. And take it for what it's worth because there's different law enforcement involved here. The Pima County Sheriff's Department put out a statement saying, they're aware of the reports but have not been contacted by the Mexican authorities. The FBI has had said nothing. No US law enforcement is involved in any of these searches. Nogales police accompany the Volunteers for Safety but they're not investigating anything related to Nancy Guthrie. The Sonora State Commission for the Search of Missing Persons joined the effort but that standard protocol when collective dig in that part of Sonora, it's a safety measure, not a credibility signal about a specific tip as hey, we're here, we're searching too. It's more like, let's hope the cartel doesn't kill you and we'll try and protect you.
So what we're actually looking at is a tip that's been tested twice, failed twice and became national news, not because it produced a single piece of evidence, but because it produced a headline. Now, I'm not going to sit here and dismiss this out, you know, without examining it a little bit because, I mean, that's, we have to parse things out.
And just because I haven't found anything yet, doesn't mean it's completely a dead position. But I think it's important to take a look at what reality is and deal with it on reality's terms.
So, here's the honest case for why someone could look at this tip and take it seriously. There's a lot of reasons to take it seriously. It's not just, I think she's over here, like there's logic. The location logic isn't insane on its surface. Think about it from a disposal standpoint. If you wanted a body to disappear in someone else's tragedy, to get catalogued under Sonora's missing persons crisis, which they have, you may not be aware of that, and we'll get to that in a moment. Instead of connected to a Tucson abduction, you'd bury it exactly where the cartel remains are expected to be found. Because a lot of them already have been there. A discovery in the Mariposa area gets filed under one crisis. It doesn't automatically trigger a cross-reference to a high-profile American case 70 miles north. There's a dark logic to that, and I'm not going to pretend that there isn't. Want to get rid of a body? Don't dump it in Tucson. Go dump it where the cartel's been dumping all the bodies.