Nancy Guthrie Update: FBI Faces Major Problem in Investigation

As the FBI continues its investigation into the disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, the mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, authorities appear to have run into a bit of a problem that is making it difficult to piece together a firm timeline.

While authorities have been able to recover some photos and videos of the suspect that were captured with a door camera, those images and videos were missing some key information that would have helped investigators answer some important questions.

FBI Releases Door Camera Images

On Feb. 10, FBI director Kash Patel released a series of images and videos that showed an armed masked person at the door of Nancy Guthrie's home who appears to have tampered with the camera.

The images were successfully recovered, though they were thought to be lost, corrupted, or inaccessible.

“Over the last eight days, the FBI and Pima County Sheriff’s Department have been working closely with our private sector partners to continue to recover any images or video footage from Nancy Guthrie’s home that may have been lost, corrupted, or inaccessible due to a variety of factors – including the removal of recording devices. The video was recovered from residual data located in backend systems,” Patel wrote in a post on X.

“Working with our partners – as of this morning, law enforcement has uncovered these previously inaccessible new images showing an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera at Nancy Guthrie’s front door the morning of her disappearance,” he wrote.

At the time, the FBI said the images were from “the morning of her disappearance,” Sunday, Feb. 1, when Guthrie failed to show up to watch a virtual church service. However, that may not necessarily be the case.

Multiple outlets have reported that authorities believe one of the images was captured on a previous day before Guthrie went missing on Sunday, Feb. 1. If that is indeed the case, that would mean that the suspect visited the home at least once previously before she went missing.

It's worth noting that Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said that the belief that one of the images was captured at an earlier date was "purely speculative."

FBI Encounters a Problem

While the FBI was able to recover some photos and videos from the camera, the agency has encountered one major problem with the data: it has no timestamps.

As Harvey Levin of TMZ explained in a video on Tuesday, Guthrie did not have a subscription service for her Nest camera, so all of the data was not saved. Instead, it had to be recovered from Google, which owns Nest. However, not all of the data could be recovered, including timestamps.

"We have been talking with FBI sources who are telling us that the way they got this photo was through Google, because Nancy did not have a subscription for video from Nest. They were actually able to obtain it from Google, the way they did the video. But because there's no video subscription, there's no timestamp on this," Levin said in the video.

So, while authorities believe one of the images shows the subject at her door at a much earlier date, they don't actually have verified proof of that, so they can't be sure.

"Based on their investigation, they believe the photo could have been taken on Jan. 11 – this is weeks before the kidnapping – but they're not sure of that. It could have been Jan. 11, that is an operating theory, but they are not sure of that – they want to make that clear," Levin said.

Obviously, this is some key missing information, as the timestamps would help investigators piece together a much more concrete timeline of her disappearance and the suspect's visits to her home.