← Criminally Obsessed
Criminally Obsessed
Nancy Guthrie Latest: Why Private Investigator Thinks She's Still In Arizona
00:23:10
Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, I'm Ann Emerson and this is criminally obsessed. What is it going to take to find Savannah Guthrie's mom, Nancy? It's been four months since she was kidnapped from her home in Tucson, Arizona. And a recent anonymous tip out of Mexico sent searchers chasing a new lead. But will it actually go anywhere? I tracked down licensed private investigator Bill Garcia, who just spent a week on the ground in Arizona searching for the 84 year old Pro bono. He's not buying the Mexico theory. In fact, he believes that the kidnappers headed into northern Arizona with Nancy Guthrie.
- [00:33]
B
It gave me an opportunity to quietly look at the location and understand that this had to be a targeted event.
- [00:41]
A
Garcia says he has his eyes on who he believes took Savannah Guthrie's mother. And he's going to tell us why
- [00:47]
B
both local and FBI law enforcement are aware of the subject because they've. They've detained him at one point.
- [00:57]
A
For decades, Garcia has searched for missing adults and children across the country and around the world. Garcia says he keeps on doing this for one simple reason. Families deserve answers. And when you look at Savannah Guthrie's face, you understand exactly why that matters. Please keep praying without ceasing. We still believe. We still believe in a miracle. We need to know where she is. We need her to come home. My heart breaks for the Guthrie family. And whether it's Bill Garcia, the FBI, or someone watching this right now who holds the missing piece of the puzzle, I hope they get the answers they've been waiting for long months to hear. Be sure to like subscribe and turn on your notifications. I don't want you to miss any, any of the updates to this case. Now let's get into it. For our viewers to understand, like literally. I just happened to call you as you literally get off the road. And Bill, you don't tell anybody when you go on these trips.
- [02:02]
B
We just got back from a week long trip to the Tucson area and quite eventful. Learned a lot and have a much better understanding of the dynamics around Nancy's disappearance. And so we're continuing to digest the information that we learned and what we saw. And unfortunately, we weren't able to find Nancy on this trip out.
- [02:28]
A
No. But you feel like, you feel like you're following some good leads right now, right?
- [02:34]
B
I do. I do. We've quietly been following along since the very beginning of Nancy's disappearance. And some leads stick out a little bit further than others. And I felt it was necessary to actually go out and take a look at some of the places that we were Considering following up with later.
- [02:55]
A
How long were you on the road looking for her this time?
- [02:59]
B
A full week today. We just got back last night, so we were out there for six days.
- [03:05]
A
I have to ask you, like, what is it like on the ground there right now?
- [03:09]
B
Well, it's extremely hot, very sunny, very dry. A lot of. A lot of activity outside of the area there of search groups. It was pretty tough going, but it allowed me an opportunity to take a look at the areas where Nancy would have been, how she may have been taken away, and the direction that she may have been taken. And I've done this type of technique over and over and over for the better part of 35 years. And so I feel fairly confident that we've got some good information. We've been able to eliminate some particular areas just because it's not possible for Nancy to have been moved through these locations. And so we start to kind of narrow down on the areas that we do believe that she could have been taken in.
- [04:06]
A
Really a lot of people still out there looking.
- [04:10]
B
Yeah. What I see in this particular case is a lot of the motivation for the volunteer groups and others looking for Nancy is the monetary reward. Normally, when you have a large reward, there's people that are willing to out and put the effort in. We don't work for reward. In fact, we're doing this case pro bono.
- [04:36]
A
Bill, how long have you been doing this for? Just to remind everybody, 35 years.
- [04:41]
B
I've been licensed since June 1, 2000, but I've been actively working these type of cases since 1992.
- [04:50]
A
And you have had some success.
- [04:53]
B
You could call it success. When we recover right in person and we're able to reunite them with family, that's the greatest success that we could possibly have. If we're able to discover what actually happened and give family members that information, and at least they'll have some type of resolve. It's still very hard to accept that your loved one has passed on, but at the same time, it gives them something to move forward with, and that's what we try to do.
- [05:30]
A
You go off the grid. You're undercover. You're not sharing, you know, you're not broadcasting where you are. Obviously, I don't.
- [05:40]
B
I put up a couple of video. Not video, but a couple of snapshots of areas in the Seguro national park, one or two other places, but they typically don't lead to showing where I am. I can do my work a lot easier that way. I don't need people following me, people trying to interject their thoughts into what I'm doing. I've been doing this too long to waste the time and effort to just go at this haphazardly. And so I try to do it in a very particular fashion.
- [06:21]
A
What do you think about this tip that. That possibly Nancy was buried at a site near the U.S. border?
- [06:28]
B
Well, first of all, I personally do not believe that Nancy was taken south of the border. If she would have been taken down south, it would have most likely happened in the early morning of Sunday, February 1st. And that is a point when CBP and Homeland Security have enhanced measures at the border, both coming in and going out of the country. And so that would make it difficult for someone to actually take an unwilling person into Mexico. I have been involved in numerous searches south of the border, and they're never easy. They're very difficult. I've had the opportunity to work with the. The abduction and Missing persons unit in Mexico. They're very thorough. They're not involved at this point, which tells me that this is not that strong of a lead. If it would have been, these organizations from Mexico who dedicate themselves to do this kind of work would have been in there with their resources, manpower and and technology to look for a possible grave. Also, the fact that Pima County, I understand, has not been notified about this potential lead leaves me to believe it's not as credible as people would seem to make it. It could be bad guys just trying to lead authorities and searchers in the wrong direction. And the fact that there was a glove found near there, near that site doesn't really say a whole lot. I mean, black gloves are pretty much everywhere. So I'm having a difficult time thinking that Nancy's actually south of the border. I'm going to stay with my thought that if anywhere she would be north of Tucson and is one of the areas that we emphasized our search area, too. And so we're going to continue with that. To me, it's obvious that there was more than one person. There would have been the person with a mask. There would have been the vehicle that was called in to take the subjects away. There's very few exit areas from that location. Primarily there's two, and they both. They both empty out onto Campbell. Otherwise you're going to get lost in the maze of roads in that area. And again, that would tell me you're not going to go south into the city because you have Tucson police and other law enforcements that patrol those areas, especially in the evening and early morning hours, which tells me going north on Campbell either turning left to get towards the i10 or going right, headed up towards Mount Lemmon or even further to Pinetop, which is a little bit further away, which are areas that we took a look at.
- [09:44]
A
What compelled you to go out on this trip, this last trip, to go look for Ms. Guthrie?
- [09:50]
B
Well, typically on difficult cases where there's not a lot of evidence to look at, there's not a lot of leads, I normally will hand pick a team that is appropriate for the type of searches that we're going to do. In this particular case, I've got two subjects that have been helping, and like I said, we're a team. One of the team members was able to demask the person at the front door. And once they were able to do that, they were able to actually establish an actual person. Pima county detectives asked our team member to explain to them how they were able to decipher who the person was and actually asked our team member to instruct them to show them how they did it. And this is over the course of three or four phone calls with detectives. And the other team member has some really specialized skills that a lot of people are not really aware of. The type of ability was used by intelligence agencies here in the US during the Cold War. And I'm convinced that this person is able to lead us in a more definitive direction, especially now that we have a potential subject to look at.
- [11:25]
A
Basically, one of your team members was able to, in essence, through technology, very successfully demask who the suspect was. And then that person, who you believe the suspect is, you are able to sort of track that person down. And then as you were able to track that person down, you were able to learn what the motive or the ability would be for that person to abduct Nancy.
- [11:56]
B
That's correct. Well, we know that this person has spent some time in the Tucson area and has indicated that he has not been in the United States since 2019. But our research learned that he was here until shortly after Nancy disappeared. We've learned a lot about this person, both through social media, through other sources. We understand he was with the military in his particular country. At some point. We know where he had been working. There's some connection there to this supposed group of. Of people. They like fine things, they like. They like gambling, they like the finest coffees, the finest vehicles extravagance. And that kind of led us to some particular areas to take a look. And so I feel confident that we're on the right track. And I feel that both local and FBI law Enforcement are aware of the subject because they've. They've detained him at one point. I just don't know that they were ready to actually arrest him at that time. Because there is a certain amount of time that you can hold someone before you have to charge them or let them go. And as in many other cases, even though they have a strong belief that a particular subject has conducted the crime, they let they release them, thinking they can keep track on track of them. My suspicion is that this person traveled almost 300 miles to leave the country from a very remote international airport that we've been taking a look at and taking a look at that area. And I think once all the chips are on the table, we're going to find that we were on the right path.
- [14:01]
A
Do you have access to anything that would help you find out if there was a passenger who left that airport at that time?
- [14:09]
B
We don't. In the United States, we have asked for that. And in Mexico, it's fairly simple. Believe it or not, you can get name and flight information. You can get. And we've done that through our contacts with the missing and abducted person organization. The problem is, if they didn't stop in Mexico and they continued on to the country we believe they went to, there would be no record in Mexico.
- [14:38]
A
Do you have a firm understanding of why Nancy Guthrie. I know her. Her daughter's Savannah. We've all thought all along that that could have something to do with it besides just the wealth of someone who is a. Do you understand why it would be Nancy Guthrie?
- [14:57]
B
I don't completely understand why Nancy. I know that this was targeted. Once I went to Nancy's home, and I was lucky enough to go there on the day that law enforcement had cleared everybody off the street, they had put barricade signs up. So it gave me an opportunity to quietly look at the location and understand that this had to be a targeted event. That you can't randomly pick someone like this out of that type of neighborhood. It just would be impossible. My suspicion is because of the notoriety. I know that. I believe it was November of last year when Savannah had her mother on the show and they went back to Tucson and it kind of took a look at the area. That could have been one of the reasons that may have prompted these people to understand, hey, there's somebody with money in this area. Because even though it's a nice area, there's much larger and more expensive homes surrounding the Catalina foothills where you would expect there to be a larger financial payout if you were to Take somebody from there. I also understand that there may have been something connected to Savannah where she may have said something about one of the stories she was covering.
- [16:25]
A
How close do you think we are to finding Nancy?
- [16:32]
B
That's a tough one. I was hoping we'd be able to find her or at least find where she was in this last trip. But in some cases, these people are never found at all. And I'm afraid that that may happen here if the attention, the media attention goes away. But at the same time, I think that a lot of the inexperienced people that are out there doing tick tock and doing YouTube and doing these other types of content creator creations are actually muddying the water.
- [17:14]
A
You've said before it's a little bit of a circus out there because I guess you've got a lot of people that, that are. That are searching, but not everybody knows what they're doing.
- [17:23]
B
People think it's easy to go out and just start searching areas. It actually isn't because you have to do it in a very methodical way. If you do come across evidence, you have to be very careful about how you approach it and what you do with that evidence. Typically, if we found something, we would see it, we would photograph it, we would call law enforcement or at least document it for passing it on at a later time, depending on the value of that potential evidence. I'm sure the community's tired of having people do what they're doing. Most of them are not professional journalists and they're doing it for likes. They're doing it for whatever money they're able to make off of these channels. And it's a difficult situation because they're not providing accurate, concise information. They're sending people off in, in different directions where these searches could be better conducted. And so it's become quite a mess, a circus, I suspect.
- [18:34]
A
What do you think is going to crack this case?
- [18:36]
B
Most likely it'll be law enforcement footwork technology. It was kind of a shame that law, that federal law enforcement wasn't brought in earlier because some of the evidence may have been destroyed. For instance, the blood on the front porch. To me, that's very, very dramatic. It leads me to believe that from looking at the blood droplets and the blood splatter, to me that represents a hit to the nose. So there, I understand that is Nancy's blood. If it is, that means she was probably hitting the nose. And the splatter would have been something that would have happened from somebody coughing or most likely coughing. I don't believe it was Spitting blood. But I think in the process of maybe draining blood down the nasal canal, they had to cough. And the cough is what created the blood splatter in addition to the large droplets, which I've seen. I worked EMS for almost 10 years, and that large blood drop is significant to me as someone who had a bloody nose. It's not the typical type of blood that you're going to see from a cut or an injury. Outside of a broken nose or a bloody nose.
- [20:08]
A
What do you think you would have found there that would have gotten you closer to Nancy?
- [20:13]
B
Well, there may have been some DNA, because if that occurred, that means there was some kind of an outlash by either the masked person or possibly a second person that showed up with the vehicle. So there may have been DNA or some type of minute evidence that would have been dropped in the same area, which was most likely destroyed by people trampling over that area and it not being collected early enough or appropriately enough. We've reached out to family members. The gun through family members, not heard back. And so we kind of continue to do what we do in hopes that we are able to get that one concrete lead that'll lead us to where Nancy is. And as far as going back, it's always possible. Today I'm extremely tired and a little depressed that we didn't get more than what we had hoped for. But with time, I'll get some rest and we'll go over the video and. And the photos and the information that we did did obtain and who knows?
- [21:27]
A
Drop a comment below. I want to hear what you're thinking about this case. After hearing Bill Garcia and where he was in his search, do you think we're any closer to finding Nancy Guthrie? And what do you think it's going to take to crack this case? Be sure to like and subscribe to Crimly Obsessed. We're staying on top of the latest developments in all of the cases that you're obsessed with.