Transcription
Search, uh, for Nancy Guthrie. It's now been well over two months. Been working hard this week in Arizona. A lot of frustration within the sheriff's office. A lot of frustration about what I'm >>
Guthrie's car was held for over 40 days. Not NY's car. Annie's. The blue Honda CRV that her husband Tomaso Chion drove on the night Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home on North Camino Escalante in the Catalina foothills of Tucson, Arizona. That car was towed away from the family shortly after February 1st, 2026, taken to a forensic facility in the Tucson area, and it did not come back. NY's own car, the Subaru sitting in her garage, was processed and returned. This one stayed for over 40 days. Annie Guthrie's blue Honda CRV sat in custody, not in the family's driveway, not in their possession, in the hands of the Pima County Sheriff's Department at a local auto mechanic facility under law enforcement control. And then investigative reporter Dave Mack said three words that changed everything. Brian Anton, the NewsNation correspondent who spent 43 consecutive days on the ground in Tucson, explained exactly what that means. In serious investigations, forensic teams take cars completely apart, seats out, steering wheel off, interior panels stripped. Reassembly is not the beginning of that process. It is the end. The car came back. What they found inside it has never been made public.
Welcome to True Crime Files. If you are new here, subscribe now and turn on notifications. Drop a comment and tell us where in the world you are watching from. Now, here is what the evidence actually shows.
January 31st, 2026, 5:32 in the evening, Nancy Guthrie left her home on North Camino Escalante in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona. She took an Uber to her daughter Annie's house. A short drive, a familiar routine. The Uber driver was later questioned by investigators. He cooperated fully. He handed over all in-car footage. He was cleared. That leg of the journey is completely documented. The return trip is not. After dinner, after games, after an ordinary family evening, Tomaso Chion drove Nancy home. Chion is Annie Guthrie's husband. Savannah Guthrie's brother-in-law, a 50-year-old biology teacher from Tucson who has lived near Nancy for years. The drive took approximately 10 minutes. He pulled up to her home on North Camino Escalante. Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed to the New York Times that Chion made sure Nancy was safely inside before he left. The garage door closed at 9:50 p.m. Neighbor Ring cameras and garage door logs confirm Chion's car leaving at that exact moment when the door came down. So, the departure is documented. What is not documented is the drop-off itself. The specific minutes between the car arriving and the door closing. No independent camera captured that moment. No third-party record confirms exactly what happened in those final minutes before Nancy was alone inside that house for the last time. The only account of those minutes belongs to Tomaso Chion. He has cooperated fully with investigators. He passed a polygraph test. The Pima County Sheriff's Department has confirmed he is not a suspect. But here is the question that the car asks on his behalf and on NY's: If that blue Honda CRV was the last vehicle she was ever in, what did 40 days of forensic examination find inside it?
Two cars entered this investigation. One came back quickly. One did not come back for over 40 days. The first was NY's own vehicle, a Subaru parked inside her garage on North Camino Escalante. When investigators arrived on February 1st, it was towed from the property on February 6th, processed, returned. The second was different. Annie Guthrie's blue Honda CRV. The car Tomaso Chion drove the night Nancy disappeared. That car was taken into custody shortly after the investigation began. It was transported to a facility in the Tucson area and held under the control of the Pima County Sheriff's Department. Not for a few days, not for 2 weeks, over 40 days. Brian Anton was the journalist who kept pressing on this. Week after week on his Brian Anton Investigates show, he kept asking the same question. He quoted the Pima County Sheriff's Office directly. They still hold a Honda belonging to Annie Guthrie. It is in the process of being returned. A date and time has not yet been confirmed. Investigative reporter Dave Mack went further. On March 10th, he stated publicly, "The vehicle is at the auto mechanic right now, where it is still in the custody of the Pima County Sheriff's Department, not the Guthries, and is being worked on by this auto mechanic." Then he added, "It was being put back together." Put back together. Brian Anton explained exactly what that means. He referenced the Brian Cobberger case, the Idaho student murders. He said that in serious investigations, forensic teams will really tear cars apart. Seats out, steering wheel dismantled, every panel, every lining, every crevice accessed and examined. Viewers, that process does not begin with reassembly. It ends with it. Reassembly is the final stage. It means the examination is nearly complete. It means investigators have gone through every surface of that vehicle and are now putting it back to how it was. Former Pima County SWAT commander Bob Krygeear told Parade exactly why a car like this stays in custody that long. He said investigators need to maintain the integrity of any evidence inside and that a vehicle linked to the last confirmed contact point with a missing person stays held until investigators are satisfied they have recovered everything it contains. So the car came back. But what 40 days of forensic work produced inside it has never been made public. And that is the part nobody has explained.
Here is what the car alone cannot tell you. Because the car is one piece of a much larger picture. And that picture says this crime was not impulsive. It was not random. It was not the act of someone who spotted an opportunity and took it. This was planned. Documented evidence establishes that across three specific timestamps.
The first is January 11th. 3 weeks before Nancy disappeared from her home on North Camino Escalante, investigators began asking her neighbors for a specific piece of footage. Not general footage, not everything from the month of January. Specifically, footage from January 11th between 9:00 p.m. and midnight. On March 23rd, Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed to a local Tucson station that the FBI's own digital analysis had established something occurred on January 11th. He refused to say what. He would not describe it. In the date and the silence around it are what matter. Then on March 21st, 2 days before Nanos spoke publicly, the Guthrie family issued their own statement. They asked Tucson residents to search their memories around specific dates. They named January 31st, they named February 1st, and they named January 11th specifically. A family navigating an active kidnapping investigation does not flag a date 3 weeks before their mother disappeared without a reason.
The second timestamp is from the doorbell footage itself. Fox News Digital reported through two sources with knowledge of the investigation that the doorbell images released by the FBI may not all be from the same night. One image shows the masked figure without the Ozark Trail backpack, without the holstered firearm, standing at NY's front door on North Camino Escalante in different attire from the February 1st footage. The Pima County Sheriff's Department said the images carried no timestamps and called any conclusion about different dates speculative, but ABC News independently reported through unnamed law enforcement sources that the suspect visited NY's home on at least one occasion prior to the night she was taken. Two separate news organizations, two separate source networks, both pointing toward the same possibility that the man on that porch had been there before.
The third timestamp is February 1st itself. At 1:47 a.m., the Google Nest doorbell camera on NY's front door disconnected. The FBI and Google spent days recovering that footage from backend servers because Nancy had no active cloud subscription. What they recovered showed a masked man in gloves and a dark jacket. He carried a 25L Ozark Trail hiker pack sold exclusively at Walmart. He had a firearm holstered incorrectly at his midsection. He held a flashlight in his mouth and he covered the camera lens with foliage from a potted plant on the porch. He was not rushing. He was not panicking. Neighbors also reported to investigators that their internet service went down on the night of February 1st. An antenna-like device visible in the suspect's pocket on the doorbell footage raised questions among investigators about whether a signal disruption device was used that night. The FBI went door-to-door asking neighbors about internet outages. And that canvassing did not happen until 34 days into the investigation. Three timestamps, weeks of preparation, a suspect who knew the neighborhood, knew the camera positions, and knew that Nancy lived alone. That level of knowledge does not come from nowhere. And the blue Honda CRV that drove Nancy home that night sits at the intersection of everything this planning required.
Take a breath here because this is where the story slows down. Not because there is less to say, because what comes next requires you to sit with it. When Annie Guthrie and Tomaso Chion arrived at NY's home on North Camino Escalante on the morning of February 1st, 2026, they did not walk into chaos. They did not walk into a crime scene that looked like a crime scene. Savannah Guthrie described exactly what they found in her interview with Hoda Kotb. She said the family initially thought Nancy might have had a medical episode, that maybe paramedics had come in the night because the back doors were propped open, and that did not make sense. But the inside of the house, it did not look like someone had been taken against their will. Law enforcement sources confirmed to Brian Entin that the interior was described as immaculate. No overturned furniture, no broken objects, no visible signs of a physical confrontation inside those walls. The blood was on the porch. Only on the porch at the exit point, not inside. Think about what that means. An 84-year-old woman. Someone Sheriff Nanos himself described as sharp as a tack mentally, but with significant physical limitations. Someone who could not walk 50 yards unassisted was removed from her home in the middle of the night without a single trace of a fight inside. Her hearing aids were in the house. She could not hear a door open. She could not hear footsteps, but she was aware. She was present. She was mentally sharp. So, how does that happen? There are three possibilities. She was controlled through fear. A weapon or a threat that stopped her from resisting. She was sedated or incapacitated before she could respond. Or she was approached by someone whose presence at her door in the middle of the night did not immediately feel like a threat. Someone she recognized, someone whose voice she knew, someone who had been inside that house before. Right now, everything points outward. A masked stranger, a professional operation, an unknown person on a porch. But strangers do not know that your hearing aids are out after 10:00. Strangers do not know which doors to prop open. Strangers do not know the exact window between the last family member leaving and the moment the house goes completely silent. The car that drove Nancy home that night was driven by someone who knew all of that. Not because he is a suspect, because he was family. And that is exactly the question the car is still answering.
On February 16th, 2026, 16 days after Nancy disappeared from her home on North Camino Escalante, Sheriff Chris Nanos issued a formal statement. He said the Guthrie family, including all siblings and spouses, had been cleared as possible suspects. He said the family had been nothing but cooperative and gracious. He called them victims. And he went further than that. He said directly publicly that to suggest otherwise was not only wrong, it was cruel. That statement deserves to be taken at full face value. The Pima County Sheriff's Department issued it. Law enforcement issued it. No agency has walked it back. The Guthrie family are not suspects. But here is the sequence that nobody has examined carefully enough. The clearance was issued on February 16th. Annie Guthrie's blue Honda CRV, the car driven by Tomaso Chion on the night Nancy disappeared, was still at a forensic facility in Tucson, still in the custody of the Pima County Sheriff's Department, still being worked on. It was not returned until after March 11th, 2026, nearly 4 weeks after the family was officially cleared. Retired FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer addressed this directly in a video on her YouTube channel on March 1st. She said she wanted to debunk the idea that the car being held meant the family was suspected of something. She pointed out that the car was likely taken with consent, not by warrant. She raised legitimate forensic reasons why it might still be held. Is it possible a tracker was placed on that car before the night of the abduction? Is it possible the car carries fingerprints from someone who was not supposed to be near it? Is it possible it holds DNA from a second person? She was not pointing a finger. She was listing what investigators look for. And she was right that a consent-based search tells you something specific. When law enforcement asks for a vehicle and the family hands it over voluntarily, that is cooperation. It is not evidence of guilt. But a clearance issued before the examination of that vehicle was complete means one thing. The clearance was not based on what the car contained. It was based on something else. Digital evidence, cell tower records, polygraph results, something that did not require waiting for the car. The car came back. What it contained has never been disclosed.
Drop a comment right now. Do you think 40 days of forensic work on that car produced evidence that supports the clearance or evidence that investigators are still processing quietly? Tell us what you think. We read every single comment.
The car is one track. It is not the only one. Because while Annie Guthrie's blue Honda CRV was sitting in a forensic facility in Tucson being taken apart piece by piece, investigators were simultaneously building a case on multiple other fronts. And right now in April 2026, those fronts are converging. Here is where each one stands.
The mixed DNA profile recovered from inside NY's home on North Camino Escalante is still being processed at a private lab in Florida. Sheriff Nanos confirmed the sample presents serious challenges. The DNA recovered from the property is what forensic scientists call a mixed profile. Genetic material from more than one person layered together. Neither contributor matches anyone in the FBI's CODIS database of over 19 million offender profiles. The software needed to separate those profiles and isolate a single usable sequence does not currently exist in a form available to the FBI or its partner labs. But C.C. Moore, the chief genetic genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs in Virginia, the woman who has personally contributed to solving over 300 cold cases, said something this week that changes the picture. She said companies are now rushing new mixture deconvolution software into existence specifically because of NY's case. The release timeline has been moved up. The technology that did not exist in March may exist right now. And she added something that nobody else has focused on. She said the bite flashlight is the most likely remaining source of the suspect's DNA. Watch the doorbell footage carefully. The masked man on NY's porch on the morning of February 1st had a flashlight in his mouth. Not in his hand, in his mouth. C.C. Moore told NewsNation that a bite flashlight produces a significant amount of saliva and that it would be very difficult not to leave some of that behind. She said DNA is hardy. She said if that flashlight was recovered and preserved, it may be the one object in this entire case capable of turning a blurred figure on a camera into an identifiable name. The flashlight held in his mouth for 41 minutes inside that house. If investigators have it and have not yet swabbed it specifically for saliva, Moore said it is not too late.
Then there is the car on Camino Royale. At 2:36 in the morning on February 1st, 8 minutes after NY's pacemaker disconnected from her phone at 2:28 a.m., a Ring camera owned by Elias and Danielle Stratagleas captured a vehicle driving south on Camino Royale. A back road out of the Catalina foothills, a road that avoids every major intersection between NY's neighborhood and the arterial routes out of Tucson. Retired NYPD detective Pat Brown reviewed that footage and assessed the vehicle as a Kia Soul based on the roof line, the window design, and the vertical rear brake lights. Driving south on Camino Royale leads to East River Road. East River Road connects to Interstate 19. Interstate 19 runs south toward the Mexican border, towards Sonora, the exact state mentioned in the ransom notes received by TMZ in April as the location where Nancy was allegedly seen alive with her kidnappers. That may be coincidence. The timing is not. The FBI has that footage. They know what direction that car was heading. They have not said so publicly.
And the cell tower data from the night of February 1st, which investigators are analyzing, does not need the DNA to resolve before it tells its own story. It tracks devices. It tracks movement. It does not require a lab result. It does not require a match in a database. The DNA, the flashlight, the car, the cell towers, the digital forensics from January 11th, these are not isolated leads. They are parallel tracks moving in the same direction. And the person responsible for what happened on North Camino Escalante on February 1st has been running on borrowed time, 72 days in. The science is still moving, and it is moving toward one answer.
When the deconvolution software finally separates the mixed DNA profile from inside NY's home on North Camino Escalante, and the science says it will, those individual sequences enter genealogy databases. Platforms like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA where people have voluntarily uploaded their DNA and consented to law enforcement access. The system searches for partial matches, a distant cousin, a second cousin twice removed. Someone who shares as little as 1% of their DNA with the unknown contributor. That partial match, however small, is enough to begin building a family tree. That tree narrows. Names emerge. Those names get cross-referenced against the physical description from the doorbell footage: male, 5'9" to 5'10", average build, black mustache. Against the cell tower data from the night of February 1st. Against whatever the FBI's digital analysis established about January 11th. The date both law enforcement and the Guthrie family have flagged publicly without ever explaining why. Any single one of those tracks is enough to resolve this case. And the car is not separate from that picture. Annie Guthrie's blue Honda CRV, driven by Tomaso Chion on the night Nancy disappeared. Held for over 40 days at a Tucson forensic facility. Taken apart, reassembled, returned without a single public word about what 40 days of work produced. That car is not a peripheral detail. It is a landmark in this investigation. Whatever investigators found inside it or confirmed was not inside it contributed to conclusions that have already been reached. Those conclusions are in the record in a file, in a lab report, in a chain of evidence that does not disappear regardless of what gets disclosed publicly and what does not. Records do not vanish. Evidence does not expire. And somewhere inside that record, the answer to what happened to Nancy Guthrie on the night of February 1st already exists.
Her medication was on the kitchen counter. The 10:00 dose she was supposed to take the night she came home from dinner at Annie and Tomaso's house. The dose she took every single night. Found untouched the next morning by the family who arrived to check on her. Her hearing aids were in the house. Her phone was on the nightstand. Her car was in the garage. Everything that belonged to her life was exactly where she left it. She has not been seen since a Bluetooth signal dropped at 2:28 in the morning, day 72. Nancy Guthrie is 84 years old. She is sharp. She is strong. She raised three children alone after losing her husband at 46. She built a life in Tucson for over 5 decades. She brought live music to a hospital. She was a 30-year churchgoer whose single missed service triggered everything that followed. She deserves an answer. And the people who know what that answer is, they are not as protected as they believe.
This is True Crime Files. We do not move on when the news cycle does. We stay on this case until there are answers. Subscribe right now and turn on notifications. When this investigation breaks, this channel will be the first to break it down. Drop a comment. After everything you just heard, do you believe the 40 days spent on that car produced the missing link, or is the real answer still sitting somewhere else, waiting to be found? Tell us. We read every single one. And stay close because the next video is about the bite flashlight, the object the masked man held in his mouth for 41 minutes inside NY's home. CeCe Moore, the woman who has solved over 300 cold cases, says it may contain the suspect's saliva. And if it does, it does not just change this investigation, it ends it. We'll see you in the next.