Cadaver dogs previously deployed in the search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie, are no longer being used as the investigation stretches past five weeks with no arrest and no body recovered.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed the dogs had been brought in earlier in the case but said they are currently sidelined. His explanation was brief.
They are available if needed in the future.
Nancy Guthrie is believed to have been kidnapped from her home in the Catalina Foothills in northern Tucson around 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 1. She has not been found. No suspects have been publicly identified. The biggest lead so far has been a Nest camera video showing a masked intruder, described as 5 feet, 9 inches to 5 feet, 10 inches tall, on Guthrie's doorstep the morning of her abduction.
A combined reward of more than $1.2 million has been posted. Tens of thousands of viable leads have reportedly come in. Savannah Guthrie has asked anyone with information to dial 1-800-CALL-FBI.
And yet, five weeks in, the public knows almost nothing.
Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant and spokeswoman for the National Police Association, offered a possible explanation for the tight-lipped approach. She is not involved in the case but said the decision to pull back cadaver dogs could signal strategic calculation rather than stalled momentum.
I do believe that the sheriff's department has much more information that they are not releasing to the public.
Smith went further, suggesting the secrecy may be deliberate.
And I'm not sure at this point why that would be, unless they have a solid suspect and don't want to tip them off.
That reading tracks with Nanos's own posture, the New York Post reported. When asked last week whether leads were narrowing, the sheriff told Fox News Digital only that "anything is possible" and declined to discuss specific leads or evidence in the case. Authorities have said they won't consider the case cold until they run out of viable leads to follow up on.
The sheriff's department sought K-9 assistance from the local Border Patrol office earlier in the investigation. When pressed for more details on the dog deployments, the department deferred comment to Customs and Border Protection, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
That's a lot of doors closing for a case that is supposedly wide open.
The information vacuum has done what information vacuums always do: drawn in people determined to fill it themselves. The Pima County Sheriff's Department investigated a possible trespass incident after members of a volunteer search collective known as the Searching Mothers of Sonora looked into Nancy Guthrie's disappearance.
Whatever the details of that incident, the dynamic is telling. When law enforcement holds everything close and offers the public nothing more than "anything is possible," frustrated citizens take matters into their own hands. Authorities then spend resources investigating the volunteers instead of reassuring the community that the actual case is progressing.
This is not an argument against operational secrecy. Serious investigations sometimes require it. But there is a difference between protecting a case and stonewalling a community, and Pima County is testing that line.
Consider what is known. An 84-year-old woman was taken from her home in the middle of the night. There is a video of a masked intruder at her door. There is a seven-figure reward. There are tens of thousands of leads. There are cadaver dogs that were brought in and then pulled off. There is a sheriff who will confirm almost none of this in any meaningful detail.
The lack of a public suspect, the withdrawal of cadaver dogs, the deference to federal agencies that won't return calls: none of this, on its own, is damning. Taken together, it paints a picture of an investigation that is either closing in on something or has run into a wall it doesn't want to admit exists.
Smith's instinct may be right. Departments sit on information when they're building a case, not when they've given up. The alternative is harder to accept.
Nancy Guthrie's family is waiting. The public is waiting. Five weeks is a long time to have nothing to show but silence and a sidelined dog.
