It’s been 3 months since Nancy Guthrie disappeared – why hasn’t she been found yet? 

The chilling black and white footage shows an unknown man bow his head as he approaches 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie’s front door.

Gloved and masked in a balaclava, he stalks through the Arizona porch on 1 February, carrying a backpack. Moments later, at 1.47am, the doorbell cam that captured his arrival is disconnected.

We don’t know what happened next.

When pensioner Nancy didn’t show up to a friend’s house the next day for church, the police were contacted and she was reported missing.

Detectives later found her blood on the driveway of her home in the affluent Catalina Foothills, outside Tucson.

News reports were immediately issued stating that Nancy, mother of prominent NBC news presenter Savannah Guthrie, was missing. The footage from her doorbell camera was released, huge billboards were posted bearing Nancy’s image, a $1.2million dollar reward was offered for information and law enforcement have fielded thousands of calls and tip offs.

Yet, three months on, Nancy is still missing.

Her family remains grief-stricken. Savannah tearfully told interviewers in March: ‘Someone needs to do the right thing. We are in agony. It is unbearable.’

Since then, conspiracy theories have proliferated. That Nancy wandered off, that her disappearance could be linked to Jeffrey Epstein because Savannah interviewed his victims. That her family is somehow involved.

Armchair sleuths have been falling over themselves to offer an explanation, while live streamers and podcasters have camped outside Nancy’s house and online psychics have thrown their weight into the circus.

For Morgan Wright, CEO of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, it is a very simple, binary case.

He tells Metro: ‘I’ve worked hundreds of burglaries, as well as violent crime, homicide, sexual assaults and robberies. There have been violent confrontations in a home where a burglar thought nobody was home, and it ended up in the death of the homeowner.

‘I’ve never in my career seen a burglary that turned into a kidnapping in a situation like this.

‘So that leads me towards the question – is it an abduction?’

Morgan, a former detective in state and local government, who has trained the FBI and the CIA on interview, interrogation and behavioural analysis – as well as working with the Met in the UK – is concerned about the proliferation of conspiracy theories that have emerged.

Since Nancy went missing, investigators have looked into gloves found near the scene, sightings of the pensioner across multiple locations and ransom notes sent to the family – all of which, he insists, were red herrings.

Bad information and wild guess work hinders investigations, Morgan warns, pointing to the DC Sniper attacks in 2002 in which ten people were killed on the streets.

Following erroneous witness reports, much of the search for the shooters was based on the belief that they were in a white van. It later emerged that the killers had been hiding in the trunk of a dark blue 1990 Chevy Caprice.

‘Pretty soon that was the narrative the press and police picked up on. We had all the information we needed to solve the case, but what was inferred became assumed and what was assumed became amplified.

‘That’s kind of what we’re dealing with in Nancy Guthrie’s case,’ he adds.

‘She’s 84-years-old, unable to walk very far on her own, cardiac compromised, and had a violent confrontation at two o’clock in the morning. The chances of survival are extremely low.

‘Early on I said we should treat this as a no-body homicide, not a missing person.’

Any theories that ransom notes sent to the family and news outlets were from Mexican cartels, because of Nancy’s proximity to the border, are also wildly inaccurate, says Morgan.

‘The cartel doesn’t operate in that way. They want money and they want it now – get in, get out. A ransom note sent to gossip site TMZ is not a serious note. It got someone 15 minutes of fame and they lived vicariously through the agony of the family.

‘I know the family thinks that a couple of those might have been legitimate, but the notes failed the basic test.

‘Ransom communications need to have at least one of two things, either proprietary information – stuff that the sender knows that nobody else knows, like the existence of scar on the left side of a knee from an arthroscopic surgery – or you have incontrovertible proof of life.’

None of this has been present in any of the notes, he says, which are a hindrance. Just like the emails Morgan receives regularly from people who have used AI to ‘remove’ the ski mask from the suspect’s face to show what the guy looks like underneath.

Uninformed ‘intelligence’ can be used by commentators to get clicks, but it detracts from the investigation, he says.

‘It is AI slop. I never put any stock in it. Time, money, people, resources are not unlimited. You only have so many detective constables.

‘Every time you create this narrative, you take away valuable resources that should be looking for the suspects.

‘The part that bothers me, coming from somebody who’s had to deliver the worst news any family is ever going to get – that their loved one is never coming home again – is that they have no idea the pain it causes the family.

‘All that these swivel chair commandoes are doing is inflicting additional damage. Because a lie told once is a lie. But a lie told one thousand times starts to become the truth.

‘None of these folks are interested in solving the case. All they’re interested in is generating views. It’s a free country and people are going to say what they want.

‘But remember, these words have impact. There is a family out there on the other side of that tweet or TikTok video that is being hurt every time you get the facts wrong, you make assumptions or you name suspects.’

Morgan doesn’t know how the Guthrie case will pan out, but suspects the real answer of what happened to Nancy will not come until someone with knowledge of the case is arrested further down the line and they try and plea-bargain their way out of a long sentence.

He also fears that the case may end in tragedy, with the discovery of a grave site. ‘The reward here is up to $1.2 million,’ says Morgan. ‘If that much money can’t get somebody to call in with the tip that finds Nancy, what does that tell you?’