Volunteer searchers hunting for 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie pulled a black backpack from a storm drain Sunday morning, just two miles from the home where she was last seen nearly four weeks ago. Volunteer Catherine Lopez found the backpack at around 11 a.m. in the tunnel just off West Orange Grove Road, close to State Route 77. She called the Pima County Sheriff's Office, and a deputy arrived within 15 minutes.
Authorities have since confirmed that the backpack is not linked to Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. It is not the Ozark Trail backpack seen in the surveillance video, but Pima County deputies did take it from the volunteers.
The discovery tells two stories at once. One is about ordinary citizens refusing to sit still while a case goes cold. The other is about a sheriff's department that, after more than three weeks with no arrest and no named suspect, is now telling those same citizens to go home.
Members of the public are growing desperate for answers as the search for Nancy Guthrie enters its fourth week. Early on Feb. 22, volunteers gathered in the parking lot of a Tucson Hobby Lobby before beginning an informal search not far from Guthrie's house.
The volunteers belonged to Searching Mothers of Sonora, a collective of women from Mexico who lost loved ones to cartel violence. They came to search for someone else's mother. Searchers also recovered articles of clothing from inside a drainage pipe in the area, and deputies collected those items alongside a black glove the volunteers had found nearby.
Yet another glove was also found nearby on Sunday, just off North First Avenue. Whether any of these items connect to Guthrie's case remains to be seen. But the volunteers are finding things. That matters when confidence in official channels is thin.
One day before the backpack turned up, the Pima County Sheriff's Department addressed volunteer search groups on Feb. 21, asking them to give investigators space to do their work and saying it is best left to the professionals.
Some volunteers were even poking around in Nancy's front yard, and deputies arrived shortly after looking to speak with those women. There is a legitimate concern about contaminating a crime scene. No serious person disputes that. But the optics of law enforcement telling grieving, motivated citizens to stand down while offering no visible progress of its own are not great.
Nancy Guthrie went missing on the night of Jan. 31 and was reported missing on Feb. 1 when she didn't show up for church. Blood confirmed as hers was found on the front porch. Authorities believe she was taken against her will.
On Feb. 10, the FBI released doorbell camera footage showing a masked man on Guthrie's porch the morning she vanished. He wore gloves, carried the Ozark Trail backpack, and appeared to have a firearm in a distinctive holster. The bureau described him as male, roughly 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall, with an average build and a black moustache.
This week, investigators identified the backpack as a black Ozark Trail Hiker, sold exclusively at Walmart. Sheriff Chris Nanos said his office is working with Walmart managers across Arizona to trace recent sales. That is the kind of concrete investigative work the public wants to see. But three weeks into a kidnapping case, identifying the brand of a backpack feels late.
A glove found roughly two miles from the home yielded DNA from an unknown male, but produced no match in federal databases. DNA other than Nancy Guthrie's was discovered inside her home, but the sample is mixed, meaning it contains genetic material from more than one person, making testing and analysis far more complex.
No suspect has been named. No arrest has been made. Nancy Guthrie, 22 days on, remains missing.
According to the New York Post, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is accused of letting his ego derail the hunt for Nancy. Those accusations gained new fuel when it was revealed that the Pima County Sheriff's Office, which is leading the investigation, is also the focus of an A&E reality series called "Desert Law." Filming for the first two seasons took place in 2025 and does not include coverage of the Nancy Guthrie case. Still, a sheriff's office starring on a reality show while running a nationally watched kidnapping investigation raises fair questions about priorities.
The sheriff's remarks about having no new names to investigate ran counter to statements from local businesses about how they've been shown a list of names and images by the FBI. That kind of contradiction does not breed public trust.
With no suspects or persons of interest identified, more than three weeks after Nancy was reported missing, authorities are set to scale back the search in the coming days. Read that again. The department telling volunteers to stand down is the same department preparing to scale back its own operation.
Savannah Guthrie stepped away from her NBC duties to help in the search. In a video posted on Feb. 15, she addressed whoever took her mother: "It's never too late to do the right thing," she said.
Investigators are not ruling out the possibility that more than one person may have been involved in Nancy Guthrie's abduction. A ransom note sent to a media outlet demanded payment in bitcoin, and the Guthrie family released a video offering to pay despite receiving no proof of life. A second ransom note was also received, and two deadlines came and went with no further contact.
The rewards for information leading to Nancy Guthrie or her captor now total more than $200,000 following an anonymous donation. The FBI has received more than 21,000 tips in this case. Thousands of tips, hundreds of thousands of dollars in rewards, hundreds of law enforcement personnel, and still: nothing conclusive.
The volunteers who gathered in that Hobby Lobby parking lot on Saturday morning understand something that official statements cannot quite convey. An 84-year-old woman was taken from her home in the middle of the night, and the people charged with finding her are asking the public for patience they have not earned. The mothers from Sonora did not wait for permission. They searched. And they found something, even if it turned out not to be the thing.
Nancy Guthrie is still missing. Someone knows where she is.
