FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday that the delay of Arizona authorities in allowing federal help in the Nancy Guthrie case likely cost investigators valuable video evidence.
Patel has claimed Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos kept the FBI out of the case for four days, with other officials saying local law enforcement initially seemed to stonewall federal investigators in the sweeping search for Guthrie, the elderly mother of Today cohost Savannah Guthrie, who disappeared from her Tucson home on Feb. 1.
This week, Patel told Fox News Digital that had the FBI been involved sooner, agents may have been able to recover additional video evidence, which could have included a suspect vehicle, more footage of the masked intruder, or additional imagery from a prior visit to Guthrie’s home. The FBI worked with Google to recover cached video from Guthrie’s Nest doorbell camera that was not intended for long-term storage and was on the verge of automatic deletion. He said that the recovery raised the question of whether there was more footage that could have been recovered of the night of Guthrie’s kidnapping that may have been deleted before the FBI was given access.
“We were looking for the needle of all needles in all haystacks, because since she didn’t pay for it, they didn’t record that data,” he said. “But there was a chance that it was located in their cache just before it was being deleted.”
The most significant video evidence investigators have uncovered so far comes from the doorbell footage. The Nest camera was disconnected at 1:47 a.m. on the evening Guthrie vanished. A little later, at 2:12 a.m., the camera’s software detected movement. Investigators initially said there was no video available since Guthrie didn’t have an active monitoring subscription to Nest, but experts were later able to access valuable footage of the elderly woman’s suspected killer, who remains on the loose nearly six months after she went missing. Patel said investigators worked with Google to recover the footage from “residual data located in backend systems.”
The FBI believes the suspect is a man between 5’9” and 5’10” tall, with an average build. He was seen carrying a 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack from Walmart, according to officials.
Nanos has said he did not impede FBI investigators at any point during the case. But he has faced criticism for opening up the crime scene at Guthrie’s Tucson home in the early days of the investigation, which he later conceded was likely a mistake, among other issues.
RANSOM NOTE ABOUT NANCY GUTHRIE’S DISAPPEARANCE CLAIMED SHE DIED
A Pima County official said in May that Nanos was angry with her for giving the FBI information on the Guthrie case, because “it was inferred that we were creating a lot of additional work for the Sheriff’s Department.” Pima County Assessor Suzanne Droubie said Nanos seemed stressed and frustrated when she told him that her office had complied with a request for information from the FBI, according to the Arizona Republic.
“I felt like there was an insinuation that I had done something wrong by cooperating with the FBI,” Droubie said. “At that particular moment, I felt like I was put in a position where I felt like I almost should apologize, where I know definitely that that was not something that I should be doing.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
