Hundreds of agents search for Nancy Guthrie as her case spotlights other families left behind

Hundreds of federal and local agents scoured the Arizona desert and followed possible leads in the nearly two weeks since Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her affluent neighborhood, reminding the families of other missing persons how elusive answers can be.

On the one hand, families who spoke to The Associated Press shared the deep pain Nancy Guthrie’s children, including prominent “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, have expressed publicly.

On the other hand, people like Tonya Miller — whose own mother disappeared under suspicious circumstances in Missouri in 2019 — say they feel frustrated as they see endless resources flood the search for Guthrie.

“Families like ours that just have your typical missing persons, they have to fight to get any help,” Miller, 44, said.

Miller’s mother, Betty Miller, is one of the thousands of people listed as kidnapped each year, according to federal statistics. In most cases, families like Tonya Miller say it’s a full-time job advocating for a fair and thorough investigation.

Guthrie is flooded with research sources

The apparent abduction of Nancy Guthrie has gripped the country, after authorities believe she was taken against her will. People in her neighborhood tied yellow ribbons to the tree to show their support.

Several news outlets have reported receiving the ransom notes, and the Guthrie family has expressed a willingness to pay — although it’s not known whether the ransom notes, which demanded money at a deadline that had already passed, were authentic.

Meanwhile, several hundred detectives and agents are now assigned to the Nancy Guthrie investigation, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said.

FBI spokesman Connor Hagan declined to say how many of those agents were federal law enforcement and how many were already assigned to Arizona. He also did not clarify how the federal agency prioritizes different missing persons cases.

However, he said Critical Incident Response Group agents, technical experts and intelligence analysts are working to bring Guthrie home. There is also a 24-hour command post where dozens of agents parse the 13,000 tips that have flooded in from the public, among other responsibilities, according to a post by the agency.

Abductions are rare

Most of the missing people are believed to be runaways – not abducted or abducted.

More than 530,000 missing persons records were entered in 2024, the last year the National Crime Information Center published data. By the end of the year, more than 90,000 cases on that list remained unresolved — some going back decades.

About 95% of the millions of cases filed in 2024 were believed to be absconding and only 1% were listed as kidnapping.

Often, the abductor is a parent who does not have legal custody of the child, the report said. It is even rarer that someone is kidnapped by a stranger.

Disproportionately black and Aboriginal people

The FBI names five abducted or missing persons, including Nancy Guthrie from Arizona, in its online database of 125 missing or abducted persons. All five in Arizona are listed as Native American or have disappeared from tribal communities except Guthrie.

That racial trend applies to the rest of the country as well.

According to a report by the National Crime Information Center, blacks and indigenous people accounted for a disproportionate number of those kidnapped in 2024. Nearly one-third of the 533,936 missing persons who were abducted in 2024 were black, although the US Census reports that only 13% of the US population is black. Similarly, about 3% of missing persons listed in abductions were indigenous, compared to 1.4% of indigenous people in the United States.

“Every person deserves to be safe, and when someone is missing, there must be an immediate, coordinated and effective response,” said Lucy Simpson, chief executive officer of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre. “For many Indigenous women, long-standing gaps in resources, coordination, and systemic support for Indigenous nations have made prevention and response more difficult.”

There is no answer for the family

Experts say that sometimes the focus on high-profile cases can be a major hindrance to law enforcement operations. But Savannah Guthrie’s celebrity status has also garnered extensive resources from federal and local government — including a $100,000 FBI reward for information about her whereabouts or anyone who can lead to her arrest.

That’s in stark contrast, Miller said, to the lack of help she received in Sullivan, Missouri, where she had to use her own time and money to find her mother, who was last seen in her apartment in the town of about 7,000 people. A box of fentanyl patches prescribed by Betty Miller was missing from the apartment and her prescription eye glasses were left on an armchair, Tonya Miller said. Her mother had a large scratch on her front door that wasn’t there before.

The Sullivan Police Department did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday.

Despite those suspicious circumstances, local police didn’t treat her mother’s apartment like a crime scene, Tonya Miller said. He had to plead with them to take fingerprints and often encouraged them to follow tips filed by the public. In the weeks that followed, Tonya Miller held search parties, printed fliers and held fundraisers to scrape together a $20,000 reward for her mother.

Tonya Miller said that as the years passed, it became harder to know how to help her mother. She has written to elected officials at all levels of government, including President Donald Trump.

“I feel so helpless,” Miller said, “because you don’t know what to do next.”

___

Riddle is a core member for reports for the Associated Press/America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that lets journalists report on issues hidden in local newsrooms.