A retired Arizona Department of Public Safety lieutenant says investigators may have minimized the possibility that 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie was taken across the Mexican border, and that doing so conveniently kept federal agents on the sideline during the most critical hours of the case.
Dave Smith, a former DPS lieutenant and law enforcement consultant, told Fox News Digital that the proximity of Guthrie's Tucson home to the border, roughly 60 miles to Nogales, makes a southbound escape route a realistic scenario. His assessment lands amid an already bitter public dispute between Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and FBI Director Kash Patel over who shut whom out of the investigation and for how long.
Guthrie, the mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie, is believed to have been abducted from her Tucson home in the early hours of February 1. Eleven weeks into the case, no suspect has been publicly identified. A combined reward of more than $1.2 million has drawn no taker. And the woman's whereabouts remain unknown.
A 60-mile drive and a 300,000-person city on the other side
Smith described the Tucson terrain in blunt terms. The valley is laced with dry riverbeds, arroyos, that cut between residential neighborhoods like oversized alleyways. Homes near the wash run into seven figures, but the landscape offers cover and complicates evidence collection.
"The evidence is transitory. Once it rains, your footprints go away, the sun is hard on other forms of evidence and frankly this is a tough place to investigate crimes."
That geography, Smith argued, matters for one reason above all. A kidnapper heading south from Guthrie's neighborhood reaches Nogales in about an hour. Cross the border, and you step into a metro area of 300,000 people, an environment where a trail can vanish fast.
"My first thought is always Mexico in a major crime, because it's a great haven, and it's hard for us to follow up on."
Smith went further, offering what he called a personal theory: if Mexico were suspected, the case would become a federal matter. And he said there appeared to be a deliberate effort to prevent that from happening.
"There seemed to be a great deal of effort to keep the feds out of this case. And the best way to do it was to deny any possibility of interstate or international transport of the person's body or kidnapped."
It is worth noting that Smith's statements are his own assessment, not findings from the official investigation. But they track with a pattern of friction between local and federal authorities that has defined this case from the start, a pattern we have previously detailed.
Patel: 'For four days, we were kept out'
FBI Director Kash Patel has made no secret of his frustration. Speaking on Sean Hannity's podcast, Patel said the Bureau offered its help immediately and was rebuffed.
"What we, the FBI, do is say, 'Hey, we're here to help. What do you need?' What can we do? And for four days, we were kept out of the investigation."
Patel also took aim at how physical evidence was handled. Early in the probe, a hair sample recovered from the scene was sent to a private lab in Florida, the Pima County Sheriff's Department's preferred facility. Patel said he had a fixed-wing aircraft on the ground, ready to fly the sample to the FBI's own lab at Quantico overnight.
"And they said, 'we're sending it to Florida,' and then, I don't know, 60 days. They have jurisdiction, so it's their call."
Eleven weeks later, the Florida lab finally shared the sample with the FBI for more advanced testing. Patel's assessment of the lost time was sharp: "We would have analyzed it within days and maybe gotten better information or more information. Our lab's just better than any other private lab out there, and we didn't get a chance to do that."
The delay in getting federal forensic resources engaged is a thread that has run through the broader investigation, raising fair questions about whether jurisdictional pride cost investigators precious weeks.
Nanos pushes back
Sheriff Nanos has offered a starkly different version. In a written statement, he said coordination with the FBI "began without delay." He added that a member of the FBI Task Force was notified and present at the scene alongside his personnel.
"The laboratory utilized by the Pima County Sheriff's Department and the FBI Laboratory in Quantico have worked in close partnership from the outset and continue to collaborate in the analysis of evidence."
Nanos also said the FBI was "promptly notified by both our department and the Guthrie family." In February, he told reporters that the investigation had not developed firm evidence indicating Guthrie was taken over the border.
Yet Fox News Digital reported that, days later, the FBI itself contacted Mexican authorities in connection with the search for Guthrie. That move suggests federal investigators took the border theory seriously enough to act on it, whether or not the sheriff's office shared that assessment.
A crime scene that wasn't secured
The early missteps extended beyond the FBI dispute. The crime scene at Guthrie's home was briefly released before federal agents arrived. Journalists and delivery drivers walked up on the front porch, where a trail of blood spatter had been found. That blood was later confirmed to belong to Guthrie, as the New York Post reported, citing former FBI agent Tracy Walder's analysis that the disappearance bore the marks of a targeted kidnapping rather than a random crime.
Walder told the Post that Guthrie's home location and routine suggested someone had studied her movements before acting. "You can get really far in nine hours," Walder said, referring to the window between Guthrie's last known sighting and the time she was reported missing, time in which a kidnapper could have reached Mexico and beyond.
Recovered footage from Guthrie's Nest doorbell camera, obtained after the FBI teamed up with Google, showed a masked individual with a backpack and what appeared to be a gun holster trying to cover or disable the camera around 1:47 a.m. on February 1. Guthrie had been dropped off at her home around 9:50 p.m. on January 31. Her pacemaker app disconnected from her phone at 2:28 a.m., a detail National Review noted in its own account of the case.
Two men were briefly detained in connection with the investigation and later released. No charges have been filed against anyone.
Ransom demands and dead ends
A ransom note sent to TMZ and local television stations demanded millions of dollars in bitcoin for Guthrie's safe return. The note included insider details about the crime and set two deadlines, including what was described as a more consequential Monday deadline. It also stated the communication would be the kidnappers' only contact. As Newsmax reported, the note suggested Guthrie may have been moved outside Arizona, possibly to the West Coast or northern Mexico.
At least one separate ransom message was later proven fraudulent and led to an arrest. FBI Phoenix Division's Heath Yonke said at the time that agents were taking the original ransom letter seriously "as with every lead."
Investigators have also examined Walmart sales records tied to the suspect's backpack and clothing and tested a glove found near the home for possible DNA evidence. The Washington Examiner reported that all of Guthrie's siblings and their spouses have been publicly cleared as suspects. Sheriff Nanos said the family "has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case."
Three months after Guthrie vanished, the case remains open with key facts that still don't add up and no public breakthrough.
The question that won't go away
Smith's theory remains unproven. He acknowledged as much. No one in an official capacity has confirmed that the Mexico angle was deliberately suppressed. But the circumstantial pattern he describes, a local agency that resisted federal help, sent key evidence to a slower lab, briefly lost control of the crime scene, and publicly dismissed the border theory even as the FBI quietly reached out to Mexican authorities, raises questions that deserve straight answers.
The family continues to urge anyone with information to call 1-800-CALL-FBI. The $1.2 million reward remains unclaimed.
Physical evidence from the scene, including blood evidence at Guthrie's front door, has given profilers material to work with. But material to work with and answers are two different things, and every week that passes without either makes the early missteps harder to forgive.
When an 84-year-old woman vanishes from her own home and the agencies responsible for finding her spend weeks arguing over jurisdiction, the failure isn't procedural. It's personal, to every family that expects law enforcement to put the victim first and sort out the turf later.
