At Nancy Guthrie’s Home, a Surreal Scene of Chaos and Camaraderie

“It’s Monday morning quarterbacking,” Nanos said. “I do it all the time, so you can do that for me. I’ll take that hit.” And to a question about whether possible evidence could have been contaminated? That’s a later problem. “I’ll let the courts worry about that.”

Even a widely reported SWAT action at a residence near Guthrie’s home Friday night was accompanied by little context: Media assembled at a designated point, expecting an update, but were told hours later that there would be no formal statement. “Because this is a joint investigation, at the request of the FBI – no additional information is currently available,” the PCSD said via X. According to CNN, no suspects were detained in the law enforcement swarm, which blocked a road about two miles from the primary scene.

Day after day for almost two weeks, a growing number of people—media professionals and self-appointed citizen investigators alike—have flocked to Nancy’s home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, where information comes out in drips and drabs, sudden flurries of activity erupt and then abruptly die out, and that crime scene tape goes up and down again and again. Consider that though the FBI on Tuesday released several still shots and clips of a person approaching Nancy’s door, recovered from home surveillance cameras, law enforcement continues to decline to confirm or deny that there were signs of forced entry to the home. “I have no clue where that comes from,” Nanos said in that news conference. “We are not discussing that at all.”

In the same media briefing, he seemed to shut down hope that any footage would be recovered, saying, “the tech company that we sent that camera off to, they’ve run out of ways to recover any video.” Because Nancy didn’t have an active subscription, the footage wasn’t saved.

Then, those images were released on February 10, along with a joint statement from law enforcement citing “residual data” on “backend servers” that “uncovered these previously inaccessible new images showing an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera at Nancy Guthrie’s front door the morning of her disappearance.” What change that made this possible? They’re not saying.

Ford Hatchett, a journalist with Phoenix’s ABC15, arrived at Nancy’s house on Monday, February 1, the morning after her disappearance, and has been back and forth between Phoenix and Tucson several times in the days since. He tells Vanity Fair that while he’s covered crime stories before, “this particular case has been pretty bizarre.”

There’s camaraderie in that cluster of media, which has grown exponentially since that first Monday he showed up, where journalists get to know one another and save each other’s parking spots or go in on lunch, while knowing that they’re in competition with one another for the same story. They talk to each other and agree that the lack of firm leads and ever-changing search parameters and requests is unusual. “This one in particular, it feels like every time we feel like we have a good handle on it, there’s a new twist or a new turn that catches us all off guard,” he says.

Hatchett talked to the man who was detained by authorities earlier this week and then released, only identified as Carlos. Law enforcement didn’t disclose why they’d stopped him, nor why they released him. Not to the public, nor to Carlos, evidently. Nanos told outlets that officers have found “quite a number” of gloves, but not whether any of them seem significant: “We don’t even know the true value of these gloves,” he said. (Neither do we.) The FBI upped its reward for information to $100,000 and nosed around a septic tank as internet sleuths went wild.

Despite the ceaseless attention on Nancy’s house, multiple delivery drivers—flowers, pizza, Amazon—have been able to walk right up to the same front stoop that law enforcement found drops of Nancy’s blood splattered on in recent days. Hatchett and other journalists were also allowed to get close to the house in the early days, after the Sheriff’s Department opened the scene, but before they closed it again. “I think almost everybody at least walked up,” Hatchett says. “At least everybody wanted to get their own eyes on it.”