Eighteen days into the search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" show co-host Savannah Guthrie, investigators have hit a wall. And the company standing on the other side of it is Google.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told NewsNation on Tuesday that Google delivered a grim assessment of its ability to recover security camera footage from Guthrie's home near Tucson, Arizona. The tech giant's response, as relayed by Nanos:
"We don't think we can get anything."
Guthrie had multiple cameras installed at her home, but she did not have an active subscription for her Google Nest security system. That means the footage that could identify whoever took her may exist somewhere on Google's servers, buried under layers of overwritten data, with no guarantee it can be pulled back.
Sheriff Nanos described the technical challenge in vivid terms, the New York Post reported:
"It's like peeling paint — you have images over images over images. And you've got to peel back very easy because you might destroy the layer you wanted."
So far, the only video investigators have obtained from the Nest system shows the front of Guthrie's house, where a masked man can be seen approaching her front door. That footage was released to the public last week and generated nearly 5,000 tips. But what happened inside the home, or at any other camera angle, remains locked in digital limbo.
This is the reality of modern home security that rarely gets discussed. Millions of Americans install cameras believing they've created an unblinking witness. What they've actually done, in many cases, is hand their security to a subscription model. No active plan, no stored footage. The camera sees everything and remembers nothing.
The digital roadblock is not the only frustration. A glove recovered approximately two miles from Guthrie's home yielded DNA, but when investigators ran it through the FBI's national DNA database, CODIS, it came back with no match.
No match means whoever left it has no prior profile in the system. It doesn't mean the evidence is useless. It means the suspect hasn't been caught before, or at least hasn't been cataloged. If and when a suspect is identified, that glove becomes a critical piece of the puzzle. But right now, it leads nowhere.
Despite the setbacks, Nanos projected confidence. He said he has "100% faith" that authorities will crack the case, and he sent a pointed message to whoever is responsible:
"If you were the guy, if you were that monster, you should be worried."
That kind of public pressure matters. It tells a suspect that investigators aren't winding down. They're digging in. Nearly 5,000 tips from a single video release suggest the public is engaged. A reward of up to $100,000 has been offered for information leading to Guthrie's recovery or the arrest and conviction of those responsible.
The investigation has also extended beyond Arizona's borders. A man named Luke Daley, 37, described as a felon, was detained in a SWAT raid on Friday, February 13, and subsequently released. He has denied any connection to Guthrie's disappearance, saying there was "no link whatsoever." Reports have also indicated the FBI contacted Mexican authorities regarding a purchase connected to the case and asked a gun store owner to check firearm sales against a list of names and pictures, though details on those threads remain sparse.
The most unsettling element of this story isn't the masked figure on the doorstep. It's the possibility that a trillion-dollar company built on capturing and monetizing data might shrug its shoulders when that same data could save a woman's life.
Google knows what you searched last Tuesday. It knows where you drove, what you bought, and what you almost bought. Its entire business model is built on the premise that no digital footprint is too small to harvest. But when law enforcement needs camera footage from a kidnapping victim's own home, the answer is "we don't think we can get anything."
Maybe that's technically accurate. Maybe the data really is gone. But the contrast is worth sitting with. The infrastructure exists to serve you an ad for running shoes thirty seconds after you mention a jog. The infrastructure to help find an 84-year-old woman taken from her home apparently does not.
Investigators have pressed Google on whether additional recovery is possible. The answer so far has not been encouraging. But the search is 18 days old, not 18 months. Cases break on the 19th day. They break on the 40th. They break when one of those 5,000 tipsters remembers something they didn't think mattered.
Nancy Guthrie's cameras were watching. Whether anyone was recording is the question that may define this case.
