Podcast Host / Narrator (28:32)
According to the sheriff, this was a delivery guy whose digital footprint may have had him, quote, in the area of Nancy's house. And the sheriff says, quote, more than one issue led law enforcement to his home. Maybe the description. I mean, it's kind of hard to have a description under the balaclava, right? A lot of people said certain eyes. You can tell the goatee and the mustache. But I mean, really, how many people have that? Loads. In any case, the man is not arrested, and within a day, the sheriff says that he is satisfied with this man's alibi. But this would not be the last SWAT raid. Another big one, maybe even bigger, was about to happen just three days later. Before I get to that, DNA developments came in. Around this time, about two weeks into the case, things began to intensify with a key discovery. A pair of gloves, black gloves, located about two miles away from Nancy's home on the side of the road. And they appeared to match the gloves that the suspect was wearing on that doorbell video. According to the FBI, the gloves were sent to a private lab in Florida. An unknown male DNA profile was developed. It was entered into the National DNA Offender Database called codis, and sadly, no match was found. Although multiple media outlets reported that their sources indicated a suspicious glove was found inside Nancy Guthrie's home. The sheriff disputed that and clarified, saying absolutely not. No glove was found inside the home. And he went on to say multiple gloves had actually been found all around the broader area. Like upwards of 16 different gloves had been found. But the sheriff also said something else that was key. Said that DNA other than Nancy's DNA that did not match anyone close to Nancy's circle that was collected from inside Nancy's home. He said that investigators were working to identify who it belongs to. We were waiting to see. Well, are you uploading that Dakotas like you did the gloves that were found two miles away, but the DNA from those gloves? Yeah. When that was entered into codis, there was no hit. No hit. And it didn't match the DNA that was found inside the home. But weirdly, we still hadn't heard if the DNA inside the home had been uploaded to CODIS and had had a hit or not. And they just keep saying that there's a mixture, it needs to be separated. The sheriff said, and they're still working on that. They're still working on that. They did not say that they'd uploaded it to CODIS and they'd had a result from codis. But here's what I think may have happened. I don't know this, but it would explain a delay. Maybe they uploaded it. Maybe they separated the DNA out and they uploaded it to codis. And CODIS did not give them a match, but said, but you know what? We do have a partial. We don't have your full match, but we do have like a 25% match or a 50% match or maybe even a 12% match, which could mean that there's a cousin in the CODIS database, which then, if that were the case, that would then take the law enforcement on a different tack, that would then take them to genetic genealogy. Well, let's go track down who this relative might be. Right. So I wonder if that is what we're waiting on and if that's the actual case, then we're going to wait for a while because it can take a long time. It's how they caught Brian Coburger. It's how they caught the Golden State Killer at California as of this recording, though, and again, we are recording on February 20, Friday night, there have been no CODIS hits confirmed in this case, but it lent itself to a big controversy over the use of a lab in Florida. By the way, the lab in Florida is a fantastic lab. Everybody I've spoken to in law enforcement says this, that this is a lab that has had confirmed incredible results. They do great work. It is a lab that. That the Pima county sheriff uses all the time. However, multiple outlets were reporting that key evidence in the case was being sent to this private lab rather than to the FBI lab in Quantico, and that the FBI was being blocked from evidence. This was like a source of friction between the sheriff and the FBI. Sheriff Nanos came out and tried to knock all that down. Said he defended his decision, saying the lab had been used in Pima county for decades and that the FBI had agreed with keeping all the evidence consolidated in one facility. Right. Said there was no daylight between local authorities and FBI. But, boy, it sure did gin up a lot of ink. For several days. Several media outlets, including, I think Reuters and News Nation, did say that their federal sources were steadfast, that there was some friction between the agencies and some folks on the ground. Law enforcement saying, we don't know who to report to. We don't know who's running the show here, the feds or the. Or the locals. But the sheriff knocked that down, too. Denied those reports, that there'd been any issues, that there was no clarity on who was leading this investigation, that they were working in concert, that they always played in the sandbox. Well, and that no one had been blocked from. From any evidence. So then came Friday the 13th, the day before Valentine's Day. Late at night, suddenly, action, lots of it. Dozens and dozens of vehicles from the sheriff's department, from the FBI, the SWAT vehicle, the bomb squad, the forensic vehicles, all flying to this location within 2 miles of Nancy Guthrie's home. And everything's locked down. The whole neighborhood is shut down. Even people who live in that neighborhood can't get in. People who are in that neighborhood are watching all this happen. Three people ended up being detained that night, two of them from a home in that neighborhood. And one of them, a man, was being held near a Culver's restaurant not far away, and he was reported to be connected to a silver Range Rover. Right. That SUV was photographed in that parking lot by the police. Multiple photographs all the way around that, looking into the windows of that silver Range Rover. And then privacy shields went up, which meant to many of us, my God, is there a body in the back? And they opened up the back, you know, hatch of the silver Range Rover, and then they closed it again. And the privacy screens went back down. We couldn't see what they were doing. Didn't look like they were unloading anything, though. And then the flatbed truck arrived, and they hooked that silver SUV up, that Range Rover and they towed it off, and they covered its license plate with a yellow piece of paper just so that none of us could get the license plate and run the plate and find out who it belonged to. We still don't know the result of what happened there. Like, that's still kind of circling, you know, Brian Enten said his law enforcement sources said there's meat on the bones of the work product from that raid. You know, from the home and the Culver's parking lot where the guy was detained in the back of a law enforcement vehicle. FBI was there asking questions. Sheriff's deputies were there asking questions. They towed the car. They had a warrant for it. We were told it was being tested. We still don't know the results of. Why was that a part of this story? How did it connect? Are there results that connect to the Nancy Guthrie investigation or not? Nobody was arrested. That man was released, as were the two people in the home. We are told through various reports it was a mom and a son, and then the other son was at the Culver's restaurant, but no arrests. So Sheriff Nano said the man who was detained near the Culver's, which we believe involved with the gray Range Rover, was a person of interest who was cooperative and later released. That's all we got. That's all we got. Still waiting. Sheriff also said, regarding any other detainees, quote, I'm guessing anyone at the residence was detained, but that is standard, standard procedure to allow investigators serving a search warrant freedom to conduct their search. I was not at the scene, he says, I'm sure people were detained, but no one was arrested. And more importantly, no sign of Nancy was found. End quote. Most critical thing, because I think so many people thought on that night, Friday the 13th, 4 o' clock in the morning, this thing went on till, right, that we'd have answers. Maybe not good answers, but at least answers. And the next day, it just all seemed to vanish. So then three weeks into the case, we start to learn how high tech the search has become. Something called a signal sniffer begins making the news. Right. It's a device that they hope is going to sniff out Nancy's pacemaker. How can I describe it to you? The way I see it and I've read into it, it is basically a device that sends down an invitation looking for something that's advertising a specific address because the pacemaker has a specific address. So this invitation goes down and starts looking around for an advertisement from that actual address of that pacemaker. And we learn that pacemakers continue to work whether the person they are assigned to is alive or dead, and they will work for years. So this is a really interesting investigative technique. And the investigators confirmed that they deployed something called blue fly signal detection technology from Parsons Corporation. And Brian Enten reports that the device was actually attached to the rudders of a sheriff's helicopter that was hovering overhead above Nancy Guthrie's home. In fact, when he was down below it doing a live shot, he was pointing to the chopper above at the time. He didn't realize it, but found out later that that's actually what was going on at that time. What's interesting about this device is that it reportedly can detect that pacemaker signal from as far away as 800 to 1,000ft. So I started asking the questions, like, why then wouldn't you put it on a drone and, you know, get close to a lot of locations? And you know what, to our knowledge, that may be happening. We don't know. There has been no update, though publicly, that this technology has had any success, that there's been a signal recovery. So now, again, week three, something else starts to surface, and it's the burglary theory. It starts to get some traction. The Associated Press, along with Arizona Family that is a a news brand that incorporates two local TV stations in in Phoenix, Arizona. They both report that investigators believe the crime may have been a burglary gone wrong. That makes big, big news. But law enforcement sources start to really push back strongly. Sheriff Nano saying that didn't come from us. So the sheriff actually pushes back publicly, saying there's nothing to indicate that this is a burglary gone wrong or otherwise. Just doesn't basically give that report any credence. And then law enforcement starts doing something else that makes its way into the reporting domain. They start canvassing gun stores in the Tucson area, and it's FBI agents visiting several local gun stores and carrying with them sheets and sheets of paper, carrying the names and photos of somewhere between 18 and 40 different individuals, asking the folks who work in those stores about people who've come into the store. Do you recognize these faces? Can you run these names? Have you seen them in the store? Have they bought A firearm here, which is huge. Even some of the firearms store proprietors or employees do interviews with the press saying that this is what happened. And the weird thing is the sheriff has asked about it in an interview with Fox, with Jonathan Hunt, and he says, that's a lie. And it's like, no, it isn't. It happened. We saw it. It's very strange. Which made me wonder, and I'm sure a lot of other people, did the sheriff not know that the FBI was doing that, or did the sheriff just not want us to know that law enforcement was doing that? Don't know the answer to that. We just know that he said to Jonathan Hunt, that's a lie. When we knew it was happening. Because, you know, the media was in there talking to the folks in the gun stores. So odd. One other thing that the sheriff did not know in this entire process was that Savannah Guthrie and her siblings worked with the FBI to record the very first video to the alleged ransom seekers. You know, asking for proof of life and proof that you have her. Apparently the sheriff found out from his wife. Brian Enten reported that when asked, the sheriff said, yeah, I didn't know about that. My wife told me about it. So the FBI may have been keeping things from the sheriff, certainly kept that from him. Maybe they kept the gun store canvassing, too. I don't know what the purpose of that would be because that would be something that would leak, would get out in any case. TMZ reports that the. The lists that the federal agents were taking into those gun stores contained people who may have purchased that gun holster. I couldn't match that reporting anywhere else, but it was super interesting because we all asked the question, who was on the list? Who were those people? The 40 people. Upwards of 40 people. Where those names come from and those photographs. Anyway, TMZ said it was people who may have bought the gun holster in any case. Fox had a report a couple days later saying that here we are in week three, and the gun store canvassing has turned up nothing. Just empty. No results, no. Nothing helpful in any case. So here we are, we're going into the fourth week of this case this weekend, and authorities have yet to be able to identify a suspect vehicle involved in this case. Shocking, but maybe not so much. It's a very, very dark area. There's streetlights aren't allowed in Nancy Guthrie's neighborhood. It's a deal that they have with the observatories, University of Arizona. They do a lot of that kind of. They call it stargazing. But it's astronomy. And so it's extraordinarily dark. And many of the cameras all around the Tucson area, as it's been reported, don't record. Some of them are only there for traffic monitoring, you know, to change the signals when the traffic's heavier or lighter. Some of them do record, but not well. And so, unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though at this point, they've got a good vehicle description because, you know, we were only, I think, a week or so into the Bryan Coburger case, and we got the white Elantra. Everybody was supposed to be on the lookout for a white Elantra, and everybody did. They found their nest and ring cams, and they found that white Elantra. Bryan Coburger driving his own car to his crime, and the neighbors found it. But here we are going into week four, and no one is able to look for a specific vehicle in this case, which is really astounding if you think about it in this day and age. You know, also in this last week, some controversies emerged over some reported Google research. Okay, the report surfaced that Nancy's address and her daughter Savannah Guthrie's salary had been searched by like, oh, in a Google search in Arizona, by somebody in Arizona prior to Nancy disappearing in the year prior. But Google saw that report and then publicly wanted to knock it down, saying it's not that simple. And it's tricky the way that they worded it. But effectively they said that Google trends, that's the searching, don't show actual individual query volume, and that low volume charts may show statistical noise for privacy protection, but that trends data cannot confirm a specific individual conducted a search. Again, hard to parse their language. But basically Google just wanted to correct the reporting, saying it's not exactly as it seemed. So that was a bummer, too, because I thought that was really going somewhere, you know, but then all of a sudden, all eyes turned south of the border. Week three is coming to an end, and law enforcement sources tell several reporters that the FBI had contacted their Mexican counterparts, the Mexican authorities, even though Sheriff Nanos had said previously and a few times during all of this that there was no evidence that Nancy was taken to Mexico. You know, during the Rio Rico raid. That was a big question. Was there thought that maybe Nancy had gone over the border. And no, that's not where this investigation is taking us. Then the attorney general of Sonora state in Mexico, that's right over the Nogales border crossing. That attorney general quickly pushed back, publicly stating that they had received no formal request for collaboration about this case from the federal authorities in the US or the federal authorities in Mexico. That was weird. Then later on, they said they reached out because of all the rumors about this. Like they said, yeah, we heard the rumors just like you, you know, that the feds are, you know, working with the authorities down here. And they said the FBI informed them right, in this state that there were no investigative leads suggesting that Nancy was in Mexico. So what a circle jerk, right? Just so frustrating. And as of the latest public statements, there's no suspect publicly identified. There's no suspect vehicle identified. There's no word if the unknown DNA profile is going to trigger a CODIS match or maybe if it's triggered a partial one and it's now being, you know, borne out in genealogical searching, genetic genealogy, IgG investigative genetic genealogy. But that mix of DNA apparently still needs to be separated. That was the last thing the sheriff told us about it. There's been no confirmed proof of life of Nancy Guthrie. Law enforcement has received more than 40,000 tips between the FBI and the sheriff, but so far, all they can tell us is that this investigation is active and ongoing. And still there are so many questions that remain. Right. All unanswered. Why was the search scaled back on day two? Why did the sheriff state within 24 hours of Nancy's disappearance that there's no danger to the public? Because that guy that I saw on the nest cam a couple weeks later looks pretty dangerous and he's still out there somewhere. Why has there been no suspect vehicle description? Do they just not have anything? How many people might have been involved? Because the sheriff is now saying as of day 20, that it's possible there were accomplices. And most importantly, the biggest question, where is Nancy Guthrie? Day 20 going into week four, agony for her family. If you have any information at all, any inkling, something you recognize, something that's odd in this case, anything. 1-800-call FBI. If there's someone who behaved in a weird way on February 1st and those days after, if they just dropped out of sight, didn't show up for work, suddenly acted strange, suddenly took way more breaks and were disappearing a lot more than they're used, you know, than they were used to, than they used to do all of weird behavior of someone, you know, in the Tucson area, right, right after Nancy disappeared. Sunday, February 1st, Monday, February 2nd, Tuesday, February. Is there somebody who acted strange? Their patterns completely changed. 1-800-Call-FBI that said, it was just today that the sheriff put out a statement saying, we have so many calls to go through. If you're going to pick up that phone, please check yourself. Is this gonna help? So on one hand they're asking for those tips. On the other hand they want to make sure that the tips are good so that they're just not sent on a wild goose chase. But the question remains, where is Nancy Guthrie? Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for watching. And remember, the truth isn't just serious, it's drop dead serious.
