Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today Host Savannah Guthrie has been missing for over a month. While the investigation remains active, with no new interruptions in recent weeks, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona has returned some of its police officers to their previous positions. The media circus outside Nancy’s house went with them.
That is not the case for allhowever. There are social media influencers still hanging around the missing Guthrie’s house, waiting for a solution to the case. And they’re not just waiting, they’re actually trying. solve the case. They look for clues while their followers give their own theories that can be scandalous.
Slate’s Luke Winkie said Today, explained Co-host Sean Rameswaram said he “thinks people think this case could be solved even though it isn’t, and that has led to a lot of speculation.”
Below is an excerpt from Winkie’s conversation with Today, explainededited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full episode, so listen Today, explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell us where you went and tell us what it was like.
I flew to Phoenix, Arizona, got into a rental car, pulled out my phone, and typed in Nancy Guthrie’s address. I drove to Tucson, about an hour and a half away, all pretty normal. And then I turned right on a street, and immediately, there were all these cars parked on the side of the road. There were drones overhead; media people just wandering around. There are people shooting videos with the front camera and talking with their streaming settings. There is no police barricade or anything like that. Anyone can show up there to cover the case.
Is there anything about this Nancy Guthrie case that is particularly potent for these real criminal tribes? Is it just that his daughter is super famous?
This is a galactically famous person, almost like in the subconscious of the United States. And we live in kind of a low-trust culture right now, and I think people are maybe more eager to believe that maybe the sheriff doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Perhaps the FBI has hinted at this. So you might be more inclined to think that a couple of YouTubers might be getting to the bottom of something or zeroing in on something that authorities have overlooked.
Did you get the sense of how much people wanted to resolve this case versus how much they wanted it to drag on through hearings?
I can’t say that the influencers wanted this to go on for the duration of the engagement, but I do think that the longer it went on, in some ways that was more validating for some of the influencers, in the sense that it allowed them to exist within this narrative, which I am the one who will be able to solve this.. I remember there was this guy, Jonathan Lee Riches, JLR, and the more time I spent there, his content stopped being about Nancy Guthrie and started being about [the authorities]: “I get that people have to be healthy and fit, but would you go, like you’re the sheriff, to the gym and work out, like the next day, when Nancy goes missing? It’s been there for days, like working out in the morning.”
The funny thing about this is that here we are a month and a couple of days away from Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping, and none of them have noticed! What are influencers doing out there?
“The best type, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 simultaneous views from people just looking at a static image. [shot] Or Nancy Guthrie’s house.”
Most influencers literally just set up a camera in front of their house and talk to a chat box that’s full of people tuning in to basically watch Nancy Guthrie’s house and wait for updates to come in, or to share random theories they saw on Twitter, or to pass along rumors.
And you might think, why would anyone tune into that? [But] There is clearly a market for this. The best type, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 simultaneous views from people simply looking at a static image. [shot] or Nancy Guthrie’s house. I talked to another guy who is from California; He drove there and his reasoning [was]: Nobody was taking the night shift.
How different is that, I guess, from CNN being around and not breaking any new news?
This is what I found myself thinking a lot about, because you’re right. the commitment [from the audience] It’s really good; You were covering the biggest story in the world and if you’re in the true crime game, this is where you want to be. You kind of have the appearance of giving people what they want. I’m here covering this story and telling it to the people who trust me about true crime.
I didn’t get a great sense that, ultimately, what these influencers were doing and what these cable news entities were doing were especially different. I think at the end of the day, everyone was hanging around Nancy Guthrie’s house waiting for the sheriff to show up to make his statements.
You could say that they are not harming anyone, but in a way they are, because haven’t they refreshed certain theories to the detriment of alleged suspects who were not even suspects?
A good example is the sheriff, when I was there, made a statement reiterating that they had ruled out Nancy Guthrie’s immediate family as suspects in this investigation. And that’s because there’s been all this speculation that someone close to Nancy Guthrie could have been the person who kidnapped her.
And I talked to a guy who was a real crime streamer and he said, “Well, I do things a different way. I like to have direct interaction with my viewers. So when the sheriff made that statement, I put a poll in my chat that said: Hey, do you believe the sheriff that his family had nothing to do with this? And in that survey everyone said that, No, I think his family still had something to do with it.“
It wasn’t like he was in charge of saying: No guys, listen, we can’t be talking about that, because the authorities ruled them out. They were still willing to engage in that kind of speculation, which you could say is a bit damaging and not necessarily helpful in solving the case.
It’s like doing your own vaccine research, except you could ruin someone’s life, right?
I was talking to this guy who was an influencer and we were talking about how streamers like him are accused of spreading misinformation. He had starred in a Inside edition article about how he and these other influencers were spreading these rumors and how the police want them to go away. I expected him to strongly push back against the idea that he was spreading misinformation. And he did a little bit, but that wasn’t really the goal of his defense.
Instead, he told me that, Listen, I’m going to do things wrong. But I’m a true crime content creator and that’s what makes true crime fun. Come up with a rumor and a theory and talk about it and explore it, and maybe later. [gets] Debunked: That’s What We Do Here at True Crime. The next day he was going to go investigate a golf course, because some of his viewers thought that Nancy Guthrie’s body might be hidden on that golf course. I felt chilled by how much I identified with what he was saying and yet how disgusting it felt.