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 chased down 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, families who spoke to The Associated Press share in the deep pain that Nancy Guthrie’s children, including the well-known “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 feel frustrated as they watch seemingly endless resources flood into the search for Guthrie.

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

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

Guthrie investigation flooded with resources

The country has been engrossed by the apparent kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, after authorities said they believe she was taken against her will. People in her neighborhood have tied yellow ribbons to tree to express their support.

Multiple news outlets have reported receiving ransom notes, and the Guthrie family has expressed a willingness to pay — although it’s not known whether ransom notes demanding money with deadlines that have already passed were authentic.

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

FBI spokesperson Connor Hagan declined to say how many of those agents were federal law enforcement, and how many were already assigned in Arizona. He also didn’t clarify how the federal agency prioritizes different missing persons cases.

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

Abductions are rare

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

Throughout all of 2024, the latest year that National Crime Information Center published the data, over 530,000 missing person records were entered. By the end of the year, just over 90,000 cases remained unresolved on that list — some going back decades.

Roughly 95% of the hundreds of thousands of cases filed in 2024 were believed to be runaways and only 1% were listed as abducted.

Often, the abductor is a parent who doesn’t have legal guardianship over a child, the report said. It’s even more rare for someone to be abducted by a stranger.

Disproportionately Black and Indigenous people

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

That racial trend holds true for the rest of the country, too.

A disproportionate number of Black and Indigenous people were among the abducted in 2024, according to the National Crime Information Center report. Roughly a third of the 533,936 missing people listed as abducted in 2024 were Black, even though the U.S. Census reports only 13% of the U.S. population as Black. Similarly, almost 3% of the missing people listed as abducted were Indigenous, compared to the 1.4% of people who are Indigenous in the U.S. writ large.

“Every person deserves to be safe, and when someone is missing, there should be an immediate, coordinated, and effective response,” Lucy Simpson, the chief executive officer for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center said. “For many Native women, longstanding gaps in resources, coordination, and systemic support for Tribal Nations have made prevention and response more difficult.”

No answers for families

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

That’s in stark contrast, Miller said, to the dearth of help she’s received in Sullivan, Missouri, where she’s had to use her own time and money to search for her mom, who was last seen in her apartment in the roughly 7,000 person town. A box of Betty Miller’s prescribed fentanyl patches were missing from the apartment and her prescription eye glasses were left on an armchair, Tonya Miller said. There was a massive scratch on her mom’s front door that wasn’t there before.

The Sullivan Police Department didn’t 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. She had to beg them to take fingerprints and often had to prod them to follow up on tips filed by the public. In the weeks that followed, Tonya Miller organized search parties, printed out fliers and held fundraisers to scrape together a $20,000 reward for her mother.

Tonya Miller said it has become harder as the years go by to know how to help find her mom. She’s written letters to elected officials at all levels of government, including President Donald Trump.

“I feel so helpless,” Miller said, “because you just 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 undercovered issues.