The Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case, now beyond the six-month mark, has seemingly made very little progress. Guthrie, the mother of Today show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was taken from her Tucson home in the early morning hours of Feb. 1 and is now presumed dead. The police and the FBI do not have a suspect and never had a serious person of interest. The shocking lack of answers does not appear to be for a lack of resources, rather it highlights perceived investigative missteps along the way.
The Guthrie family has worked closely with local and federal law enforcement since Nancy’s disappearance, and have publicly expressed gratitude for the investigative efforts. No one would blame them, however, for privately feeling frustrated over the complete deficiency of leads. At this point, the Guthries mostly just want their mom’s body back. But after last week’s Wall Street Journal story highlighting six months of failure within the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the family might soon want a pound of flesh.
Mark Geragos, an attorney to the stars (Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, Todd Peterson, etc.), would sue to get it. Then again, he’s pretty much always down to take big legal swings. Geragos told The Hollywood Reporter that “it wouldn’t surprise me in the least” if the Guthrie family ultimately sues Pima County — and he believes they’d have a case.
There is, of course, the question of why the Guthries would want to put themselves through such a lawsuit, even a winnable one. After all, Savannah Guthrie is a very rich woman — the family does not need the money. If anything, after this ordeal, they need privacy. But oftentimes in such a case, the real win is in discovery, when any swept-under-the-rug procedural errors can be uncovered. Victory could be found in ensuring mistakes are not repeated in future investigations. There is also the matter of the career that made Savannah wealthy. She’s a journalist, and journalists want to get to the bottom of things.
Two other high-profile attorneys who spoke with THR for this story say it’d be more than an uphill battle.
Bryan Sullivan, a partner at Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae and part of the legal team that just won $1.7 million for Hunter Biden in a defamation case against the former Overstock.com CEO, believes it is “highly unlikely” such a theoretical suit would go anywhere.
“It’s very, very difficult to sue law enforcement for failing to investigate, or basic negligence,” he said.
Legal analyst Dan Abrams, who founded Law & Crime and hosts Reelz series On Patrol: Live, took it one step further, calling it “almost impossible to sue a county of department just for screwing up an investigation.”
Their opinions should not be taken as a vote of confidence for the sheriff’s department, however. There is not a whole lot of that going around outside the walls of their police station.
He don’t need no stinking badges: Sheriff Chris Nanos gets a dose of reality.
Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images
Last week, Nanos released a pair of ransom notes purported to be from Nancy’s kidnapper to the public. The first stated Nancy would be killed if their Bitcoin demand was not met, and included a pair of deadlines with progressively larger payouts. The initial deadline to pay was Feb. 5; the second note, stating Nancy had “perished,” was dated Feb. 6. By all accounts, the Guthries had been willing to pay ransom to get Nancy back, which opens the door for a difficult “What if” scenario: What if they paid the ransom by Feb. 5? Would Nancy have been returned alive?
That leads to another burning question that we do not have the answer to: Were the Guthries advised by the police or the feds not to pay? Law enforcement, including the FBI, is almost always against paying out ransom or blackmail. Even if that were the case here and the Guthries were advised not to pay, it wouldn’t satisfy a burden of fault in a court of law, Sullivan says. Law enforcement is provided “qualified immunity” in such cases so long as they were “acting in good faith.”
“The police are exercising their best judgment,” Sullivan said. “Sometimes they’re wrong.”
Critics of Nanos say he’s been wrong more than “sometimes.” FBI chief Kash Patel has said publicly that his bureau was “kept out of the [Guthrie] investigation” for its first four days, which are of course the most critical days in such a case. It was known that the 84-year-old Guthrie was without her heart medication and had significant health issues. This was always a swiftly ticking clock.
And then there is the homicide department directly beneath Nanos. According to the internal records uncovered by WSJ, in late 2025, Nanos’ head of homicide David Stivers was reprimanded for exhibiting “poor judgment” leading to delays in securing crime-scene evidence in a homicide case. The charges in that case were ultimately dropped for insufficient evidence, and Stivers was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant in July.
In the Guthrie case, Stivers and his detectives have been criticized for missing or ignoring the dried blood on Nancy’s porch for the first several hours of the investigation. They failed to tape the area off, allowing access to and potential contamination by reporters, live-streamers and even delivery drivers. It was proved to be Nancy’s blood, and is now believed to be connected to the kidnapping.
Stivers should have never had the job, former Pima County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Heather Lappin believes. Lappin, who lost to Nanos in a tight election for sheriff that ended in a recount, toldThe Hollywood Reporterin February that Nanos had removed some of the department’s best detectives because they supported her election campaign.
“A lot of the Guthrie case is just consequences of his really bad decision-making, the years of decimating his units,” she said. “Three of our best homicide detectives, probably in [all of] southern Arizona, were removed from Homicide because they supported me [in the election].”
The blood blunder wasn’t the only day one mistake. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department spent so long trying to find someone to pilot its search-and-rescue plane, by the time it went wheels up, it was too dark for its zoom-lens cameras, WSJ reported.
“I can assure everybody that we are working hard every day with all of our partners,” Nanos told WSJ, including “corporate America,” which has “offered up some assistance with some of the brightest minds in this country.”
“This case is not cold,” he promised.