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

As hundreds of federal and local agents scoured the Arizona desert and pursued potential leads in the nearly two weeks since Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her affluent neighborhood, families of other missing people are reminded how elusive answers can be.

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

On the other, people like Tonya Miller — whose own mother disappeared under suspicious circumstances in Missouri in 2019 — say they are frustrated to see seemingly endless resources pouring into the search for Guthrie.

“Families like ours, who just have missing people as usual, have to fight to get help,” Miller, 44, said.

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

The country was captivated by the apparent kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, after authorities said they believed she was taken against her will. Residents in his neighborhood tied yellow ribbons to a tree to show their support.

Multiple media outlets reported receiving ransom demands, and the Guthrie family expressed a willingness to pay – although it was unclear whether the ransom notes demanding money with deadlines already passed were genuine.

Meanwhile, several hundred detectives and officers 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 specify how the federal agency prioritizes different missing persons cases.

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

The vast majority of people reported missing are believed to be runaways and not kidnapped or kidnapped people.

Throughout 2024, the last year in which the National Crime Information Center released the data, more than 530,000 missing persons files were seized. At the end of the year, just over 90,000 cases remained unresolved on this list – some dating back decades.

About 95% of the hundreds of thousands of cases filed in 2024 involved runaways and only 1% were listed as abducted.

Often, the kidnapper is a parent who does not have legal guardianship over a child, the report said. It is even rarer for a person to be kidnapped by a stranger.

The FBI names five kidnapped or missing people, including Arizona native Nancy Guthrie, in its online database of 125 missing or kidnapped people. All five from Arizona are listed as Native American or extinct from tribal communities, except Guthrie.

This racial trend also applies to the rest of the country.

A disproportionate number of Black and Indigenous people were among those kidnapped in 2024, according to the National Crime Information Center report. About a third of the 533,936 missing people listed as abducted in 2024 were Black, even though the U.S. Census indicates that only 13% of the U.S. population is Black. Similarly, nearly 3% of missing people listed as abducted were Indigenous, compared to 1.4% of Indigenous people in the broader United States.

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

Experts said the attention given to high-profile cases can sometimes pose a major obstacle to law enforcement operations. But Savannah Guthrie’s celebrity status has also garnered significant resources from federal and local government, including a $100,000 FBI reward for information specific to her whereabouts or that could lead to an arrest and conviction of whoever took her.

That contrasts sharply, Miller said, with the lack of help she received in Sullivan, Mo., where she had to use her time and money to search for her mother, who was last seen in her apartment in this town of about 7,000. A box of fentanyl patches prescribed to Betty Miller was missing from the apartment and her prescription glasses were left on an armchair, Tonya Miller said. There was a huge scratch on his mother’s front door that hadn’t been there before.

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

Despite these suspicious circumstances, local police did not treat her mother’s apartment as a crime scene, Tonya Miller said. She had to beg them to be fingerprinted and often encouraged them to act on information submitted by the public. In the weeks that followed, Tonya Miller organized search parties, printed fliers and held fundraisers to raise a $20,000 reward for her mother.

Tonya Miller said it became more difficult over the years to know how to help her find her mother. She has written letters 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 anymore.”

___

Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-reported issues.