A Mexican search group dug through terrain northwest of Nogales last week after an anonymous caller claimed the remains of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, the mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie, were buried in an unmarked grave near the U.S.-Mexico border. The search came up empty.
Buscando Corazones Nogales, a group that works to locate missing people in Mexico, received the tip on Wednesday, the New York Post reported. The caller directed searchers to the Mariposa area, Spanish for "butterfly", and described a burial site "in a grave over a stream." The group mobilized quickly, launching an initial investigation of the area with help from the Sonora State Commission for the Search of Missing Person. Municipal and state officials provided security forces to protect volunteers and workers on the ground.
They found nothing. No remains. No evidence. No closer to answers than they were the day before.
Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Catalina Foothills home in the early hours of Feb. 1. She is believed to have been taken from the residence, which sits more than 70 miles north of Nogales. No arrests have been made, and the investigation remains ongoing, though which agency or agencies are leading that investigation is not publicly specified.
The case has drawn national attention in part because of Savannah Guthrie's public profile. The "Today" host has pleaded publicly for her mother's safe return as months have passed without a resolution.
The family has not sat idle. Savannah Guthrie has reportedly spent more than $500,000 on private investigators to track down her mother, an extraordinary personal expenditure that reflects both the family's desperation and the apparent pace of the official investigation.
The Mariposa area where searchers focused their efforts is no stranger to the macabre. Buscando Corazones Nogales previously found 25 unmarked graves in the same general area earlier this year. That detail alone says something about conditions along this stretch of the border, and about the kind of terrain where an anonymous tip about a buried American woman might land with enough plausibility to mobilize a full search operation.
Ramona Guadalupe Ayala Ortiz, head of Buscando Corazones Nogales, told El Imparcial that the search turned up nothing related to Guthrie. But the group said it would continue future search operations in the area to find Guthrie and any other missing persons.
Ayala Ortiz described what prompted the effort:
"We received an anonymous call telling us that the woman's [Guthrie's] remains were in the Mariposa area, in a grave over a stream."
Who placed that call, what motivated it, and whether any evidence supported the claim beyond the caller's word remain unanswered. The tip could have been genuine intelligence, a cruel hoax, or something in between. There is no public indication that investigators have identified the caller or corroborated the information.
Four months into Nancy Guthrie's disappearance, the public record of progress is thin. No arrests. No suspects named publicly. The FBI has collected DNA from a hair sample recovered at her Tucson home, but no public update has connected that forensic evidence to a breakthrough.
At the 100-day mark, the Pima County sheriff said investigators were "getting closer", a reassurance that has yet to produce a visible result.
Meanwhile, the family has also contended with ransom notes. Separate communications have claimed to know Nancy Guthrie's location, adding another layer of uncertainty to a case already defined by it.
The anonymous tip and the empty search raise more questions than they settle. Why did the caller point to a specific area in Mexico, more than 70 miles from Guthrie's home and across an international border? What basis, if any, did the tipster have for the claim? And what resources are American law enforcement agencies devoting to a case that now appears to stretch into another country?
The fact that a volunteer search group in Mexico, not a federal agency, mobilized to investigate this tip is worth noting. Buscando Corazones Nogales does important work in a region scarred by violence and disappearances. But the group's involvement also raises an uncomfortable question about the gap between the scale of this case and the official response visible to the public.
An 84-year-old woman was taken from her home in a quiet Tucson neighborhood in the middle of the night. Four months later, the best lead anyone can point to is an anonymous phone call that sent volunteers digging through the Mexican countryside near a cluster of unmarked graves.
That is not a story about progress. It is a story about an investigation that owes the public, and one family in particular, a great deal more than silence.
