A Mexican volunteer search group scouring the desert near Nogales, Sonora, for 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie has turned up 25 unmarked graves, none of them linked to the missing mother of Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. The grim discovery underscores both the lawlessness of the border region and the desperation of a case that has produced no suspects, no body, and no answers nearly five months after Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Tucson-area home.
Buscando Corazones Nogales, the volunteer group leading the cross-border effort, searched two new locations near Nogales on Wednesday, June 17, NewsNation reported two days later. That search, like every previous one, came up empty.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen on the evening of January 31 at her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson. Authorities believe she was taken against her will. Drops of blood were found on her front porch. The FBI later released surveillance footage showing a masked person at the home the night she disappeared. No arrest has been made. No suspect has been publicly named. And the investigation has been dogged by jurisdictional friction and forensic missteps that have left the public, and the Guthrie family, with far more questions than answers.
The volunteer group's latest search followed a trail of anonymous tips that began on May 10, when someone contacted Buscando Corazones Nogales claiming Nancy had been buried in a shallow grave roughly 70 miles from her Tucson home. The group searched the area on May 16 and found nothing. A second anonymous tip pointed to a different nearby location. That search also turned up nothing.
Ramona Guadalupe Ayala Ortiz, who leads the volunteer group, told the New York Post that the anonymous caller claimed Guthrie's remains were in the Mariposa area northwest of Nogales:
"We received an anonymous call telling us that the woman's [Guthrie's] remains were in the Mariposa area, in a grave over a stream."
The Mariposa region is the same stretch of desert where Buscando Corazones Nogales uncovered those 25 unmarked graves between April and May. The graves are not connected to the Guthrie case, but their presence paints a stark picture of a corridor where people disappear and are buried without ceremony, without investigation, and without accountability.
Whether those graves are under active investigation by Mexican or U.S. authorities remains unclear, a silence that speaks volumes about the challenge of pursuing justice in a region where cartel violence and cross-border crime have overwhelmed local institutions.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos addressed the search group's activity in a June 11 statement posted to X. He acknowledged the anonymous tip but revealed a striking gap in coordination.
"We are aware of reports regarding an anonymous tip related to the Nancy Guthrie investigation that was provided to a group in Mexico. At this time, we have not been contacted by Mexican authorities. The investigation remains active and ongoing, and we will continue to follow up on any credible information."
That a Pima County sheriff already under scrutiny for his department's handling of the case had not even been contacted by Mexican authorities, more than a month after the first anonymous tip, raises hard questions about cross-border law enforcement cooperation in a case of this magnitude.
The jurisdictional problems run deeper than the border. FBI Director Kash Patel has publicly stated that the Bureau was kept out of the investigation for four days after Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. During that window, the crime scene was briefly released and compromised. A hair sample collected from the scene was sent to a private lab in Florida and withheld from the FBI for 11 weeks before being shared for more advanced testing, Fox News reported.
Four days without federal involvement. Eleven weeks without sharing DNA evidence. In a kidnapping case involving an 84-year-old woman taken from her own home, those are not minor procedural hiccups. They are failures that may have cost investigators their best chance at identifying a suspect while the trail was still warm.
Retired experts who have spoken publicly about the case increasingly point toward Mexico. Dave Smith, a retired Arizona Department of Public Safety lieutenant, told Fox News that Tucson's proximity to the border, roughly 60 miles to Nogales, makes cross-border transport a real possibility. Smith said his instinct in a major crime case near the border is always the same: "My first thought is always Mexico in a major crime, because it's a great haven, and it's hard for us to follow up on."
Bob Krieger, a retired Pima County SWAT commander, told NewsNation reporter Brian Entin that a Native American reservation may have served as a transit route. He put it bluntly:
"If I were a betting man and someone said they absolutely went into Mexico, I'd say they probably went through the reservation at some point."
Retired FBI agent Steve Moore, who also spoke with Entin, described the reservation terrain as vast and sparsely populated: "You could go miles without seeing any kind of residents." But he added a caveat, anyone unfamiliar to the community would stand out, especially in a vehicle.
The specific reservation has not been publicly identified. Whether law enforcement has pursued that line of investigation is another open question in a case defined by them.
Savannah Guthrie, who spoke publicly for the first time about her mother's disappearance weeks into the ordeal, has offered a $1 million reward for information. In an Instagram post, she wrote: "Mother, daughter, sister, Nonie, we miss you with every breath. We will never stop looking for you. We will never be at peace until we find you," as the Washington Examiner reported.
The FBI has also offered a separate $100,000 reward, and an anonymous donor contributed another $100,000, bringing the combined reward pool above $200,000 before Savannah Guthrie's million-dollar pledge, Newsmax reported earlier in the investigation. The Bureau's legal attaché office in Mexico City has been coordinating with the U.S. Embassy and Mexico's federal attorney general's office, while a suboffice in Hermosillo, Sonora, roughly 170 miles south of the border, has been identified as most relevant to the case given its geographic corridor.
Despite the scale of the reward and the federal resources nominally deployed, the case has produced no public breakthrough. Authorities have processed more than 20,000 tips. Hundreds of investigators have been involved. And yet the Guthrie family's most visible source of hope has come not from U.S. law enforcement but from a Mexican volunteer group that specializes in finding the dead.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department has urged the public to leave the search to professionals. "We all want to find Nancy, but this work is best left to professionals," the department stated, as AP News reported. Authorities have warned that uncoordinated volunteer efforts risk contaminating the crime scene.
That warning has not deterred Buscando Corazones Nogales, whose members bring hard-won expertise in searching for the missing in a region where disappearances are routine. Lupita Tello, a volunteer with the related group Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, told AP News: "We know the soil. We know when someone has dug deep or when there is a shallow grave. We hope we can help because we understand the pain of having a missing relative."
The Sonora State Commission for the Search of Missing Persons assisted in the search operation, and municipal and state security forces provided protection for the volunteers, a detail that underscores the danger of the terrain they are working in.
The FBI has weighed new forensic technology as the case approaches the five-month mark, but no public update has indicated a breakthrough. Meanwhile, the chaos that has surrounded the investigation, from the compromised crime scene to the withheld DNA evidence to the spectacle of a YouTuber arrested twice near Guthrie's home, has done little to inspire confidence that the institutional machinery is functioning as it should.
Nearly five months in, the most basic questions remain open. Who took Nancy Guthrie? Where is she? Is she alive? Has law enforcement formally classified the case as a kidnapping, or does that characterization remain informal? What, if anything, connects the suspect captured on surveillance footage to the anonymous tips pointing toward Mexico?
The 25 unmarked graves near Nogales are not Nancy Guthrie's. But they are someone's. And the fact that a volunteer group, not law enforcement, found them tells you something about the state of accountability along the border corridor where an 84-year-old American woman may have been taken.
When Mexican volunteers digging in the desert are doing more visible work than the agencies charged with solving a high-profile kidnapping, the system isn't working the way it's supposed to. Nancy Guthrie's family deserves better. So does every taxpayer funding the investigation.
