Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Bone Found Near Nancy Guthrie’s Home: What Police Know

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Bone Found Near Nancy Guthrie’s Home: What Police Know · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So imagine you are just sitting at your computer, or
• 0:04
  you know, maybe you were just glancing at your phone
• 0:07
  while riding the train on your commute.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Right, just a totally normal morning.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, a totally normal morning. You are watching a
• 0:14
  true crime live stream on YouTube, and through the screen
• 0:18
  you are virtually walking through the scorching, arid washes of
• 0:23
  the Catalina Foothills in Tucson, Arizona.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Which is an incredibly harsh environment.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: By the way, Oh, absolutely brutal. You can like hear
• 0:30
  the risthmic crunch of piking boots on the dry dirt.
• 0:33
  You know, the harsh wind is just blowing out the microphone.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you hear that heavy breathing of the person holding
• 0:38
  the camera, right, and.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: The chat on the side of your screen is just
• 0:41
  scrolling with hundreds of comments a minute. Then suddenly the
• 0:45
  streamer pauses, just dead stops. Yes, the camera pans down
• 0:49
  to the sun, big Earth. The streamer completely stops talking.
• 0:53
  The chat freezes for a split second, and then just
• 0:55
  absolutely explodes.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Oh I remember watching it.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Happen because you're looking at a human leg bone.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: It is a profoundly visceral moment to experience, even through
• 1:06
  a screen. You can almost feel the collective breath being
• 1:09
  sucked out of thousands of rooms simultaneously.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild, And I want to be clear to you,
• 1:14
  the listener, right up front. This is not some hypothetical scenario, No,
• 1:18
  none at all. This isn't a thought experiment. This literally
• 1:20
  happened yesterday May seven, twenty six.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Just yesterday morning.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: And the reason this specific YouTube live stream stopped at
• 1:28
  the entire Internet in his tracks is because that bone
• 1:32
  was discovered just seven miles from the home of eighty
• 1:35
  four year old Nancy.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Guthrie, who, for context, is the mother of NBC's Today
• 1:39
  co anchor Savannah Guthrie.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and she has been missing in an incredibly high profile,
• 1:46
  deeply chilling abduction case for over three.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Months now, over one hundred days of just absolute dead ends.
• 1:53
  I mean one hundred days of massive, highly organized searches.
• 1:56
  You have a family pleading on national television for answers.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Yes, Savannah Guthrie took a leave of absence to just
• 2:02
  look for her.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: So in that camera lens focused on that bone in
• 2:05
  the dirt. The implication was just a media and it
• 2:07
  was so heavy.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, So let's unpack this The mission of our deep
• 2:11
  dive today is to explore the bizarre, really electrifying collision
• 2:16
  of forces that happened yesterday morning.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: It really was a collision, oh completely.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: We have modern true crime fanaticism, we have incredibly high stakes,
• 2:25
  high tech criminal investigations, and then on top of all that,
• 2:28
  we have the ancient, deep time archaeological history of the
• 2:31
  Sonoran Desert and they all.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Just crashed into each other on a random Thursday in.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: May boom exactly. Yeah. So to do that, to really
• 2:39
  understand this, we are synthesizing a massive stack of source
• 2:42
  material today.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: A lot of reading for this one, so much reading.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: We are looking at field reports straight from the ground
• 2:48
  in Tucson. We have highly detailed police timelines.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: And the digital forensic data points are fascinating.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Oh, they are mind blowing stuff pulled from medical devices
• 2:57
  and Smarthlee networks. Plus we'll bring in the anthropological and
• 3:01
  geological context of the American Southwest.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Because our goal here is to separate the immediate kind
• 3:06
  of visceral Internet frenzy from the hard, incredibly fascinating facts
• 3:11
  of what is actually happening in this investigation.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Exactly. And I want to speak directly to you, the
• 3:17
  listener for a second, because you might be wondering, why
• 3:19
  should you care about a bone? That spoiler alert turned
• 3:22
  out to be a total false lead.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Right, it wasn't her, It wasn't But you.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Should care because this single event, this one chaotic morning
• 3:30
  in the desert, perfectly encapsulates the modern phenomenon of information overload.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: We really do live in a totally unprecedented era.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: We do. We live in a world where a piece
• 3:41
  of ancient history can momentarily stop the Internet, completely upend
• 3:46
  a national news broadcast in New York City, and just
• 3:49
  hijack the momentum of a modern criminal investigation.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate collision of timelines, you know, the
• 3:56
  deep past, violently interrupting the immediate present broadcast live high definition.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: That is exactly what it is. So let's jump right
• 4:02
  into that specific moment the discovery. Because this bone was
• 4:06
  not found by an official PMA County search and rescue team.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: No, the police weren't even out there at that moment.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Right, he wasn't found by the FBI. It was found
• 4:14
  by a dedicated true crime YouTuber who goes by the
• 4:17
  handle AJW News.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: And this is an individual who has spent weeks out
• 4:22
  there completely voluntarily.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: It's walking the desert, yeah.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: Combing through the incredibly rugged, really unforgiving desert washes and
• 4:31
  trails all around Nancy Guthrie's Catalina Foothills neighborhood.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: It's intense out there.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: It's a persistent, solitary, boots on the ground effort, and
• 4:41
  it's funded entirely by viewer donations and ad revenue from
• 4:45
  his stream, which is.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: A whole new economy of investigation. Yea. So, during his
• 4:50
  live broadcast yesterday, AJW News is documenting his search grid
• 4:54
  in real time.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: He's showing everyone his exact GPS coordinates on the screen.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and erting the brutal terrain, the fact that it's
• 5:02
  pushing one hundred degrees out there. Yeah, you really get
• 5:05
  a sense of the sheer, intimidating scale of that landscape.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: It makes you realize how hard it is to find
• 5:09
  anything out there.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: It really does. And then he's walking near a drywash,
• 5:13
  which that's essentially a natural drainage trench carved out by
• 5:17
  flash floods.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: Right exactly, they run all through the desert, right.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: So he bends down near one of these washes, he
• 5:23
  realizes the object sticking out of the caliche dirt is
• 5:27
  unmistakably a human femur.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: A human leg bone.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: I just keep thinking about what a massive fundamental shift
• 5:35
  this is and how we as a society consume reality.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: It's profound. We are living in a world that has
• 5:41
  been completely stripped of informational filters. I mean, the collapse
• 5:46
  of the traditional media timeline is just staggering when you
• 5:50
  look at it mechanically.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, walk us through that, like historically.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: Well, consider the historical precedent, right, If a searcher back
• 5:56
  in say the nineteen nineties found something in the desert,
• 5:59
  they would have to hike out.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no cell service exactly.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: They hike out, they find a payphone or maybe use
• 6:04
  an early clunky cell phone, and they call the police
• 6:06
  and then they wait. Right, the police would arrive, establish
• 6:10
  a perimeter, call the medical examiner out to the scene.
• 6:12
  They'd conduct a preliminary analysis behind yellow tape, always behind
• 6:16
  the tape. Then they notify the family privately, and eventually,
• 6:20
  maybe hours later, draft a press release. So it's a process,
• 6:24
  a very deliberate process. Maybe twelve to twenty four hours later,
• 6:28
  the public hears a carefully curated summary on the evening news.
• 6:33
  The facts are gathered, vetted, and processed before they are
• 6:36
  ever consumed by the public.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: But yesterday, yesterday was wild. The public was essentially the
• 6:42
  first responder.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Literally looking through the eyes of the person who found it.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you watching on your phone on the train, You
• 6:49
  are experiencing the unfiltered shock of discovery at the exact
• 6:53
  same millisecond as the person standing in the oppressive heat
• 6:56
  in Arizona.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: There is no news desk to vet the bone none.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: There is no expert to tell you what you are
• 7:02
  looking at. There is just the image, the silence, and
• 7:05
  your own assumptions.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: And the psychological and social impact of that instantaneous broadcast
• 7:10
  is totally unprecedented. The immediate social media explosion wasn't just
• 7:14
  people sharing.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: A news article right, Oh, No, it was chaos.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: It was a volatile, real time reaction happening simultaneously in
• 7:20
  the YouTube, live chat and just cascading across Twitter, Reddit, everywhere.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: You had raw immediate heartbreak from people who were just
• 7:29
  deeply invested in the Guthrie families, paying understandably so, yeah,
• 7:32
  of course, But then you also had instant conspiracy theories
• 7:35
  spinning up about how the bone was planted by the
• 7:37
  police or by the streamer himself. That happened so fast now,
• 7:41
  and then you had viewers acting as armchair geospatial analysts.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: Oh, the map guys.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: The map guys people were pulling up satellite maps, doing
• 7:50
  instant geographical math and flooding the chat with the realization
• 7:55
  that this specific wash was only a fifteen minute drive
• 7:58
  east of Nancy's residence.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Which is a terrifying detail to drop in a live chat.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: It is, and the velocity of this unverified information was
• 8:06
  so disruptive that it actually breached the walls of traditional
• 8:09
  broadcast media almost instantly.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: It leaped from YouTube to network TV in minutes minutes.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Savannah Guthrie had only recently returned to the Today Show set.
• 8:19
  She had taken a two month absence to focus completely
• 8:22
  on finding her mother.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: That must have been so incredibly hard for her, unimaginable.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: So as this live stream is happening, as Twitter is
• 8:29
  just exploding with screenshots of this bone in the dirt,
• 8:32
  she abruptly leaves the set in New York.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: City, right in the middle of the broadcast.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, amidst all the unfolding news. A highly controlled, multi
• 8:42
  million dollar network television broadcast in Manhattan is literally derailed
• 8:48
  by a guy with a smartphone and a gimbal in
• 8:51
  an Arizona dirt wash.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: It perfectly illustrates the sheer power of raw data without context.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: It really does. But you know, while the Internet was
• 8:59
  spinning into an absolute frenzy, the actual authorities on the
• 9:02
  ground in Tucson had to execute a massive, lightning fast pivot.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: They had to move so quickly.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Within minutes of that stream going viral, the Tucson Police
• 9:12
  Department was on the scene. It's around ten am local time.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: They immediately throw up the yellow tape and secure the area, and.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: What happens next is basically a masterclass in rapid multi
• 9:22
  agency assessment.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: It's really impressive how they coordinated.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Right. You have TPD detectives, you have specialized experts from
• 9:28
  the University of Arizona's anthropology.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: Department, which is a top tier department by the way.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and you have the Pima County Office of
• 9:34
  the Medical Examiner, all converging on this dry wash simultaneously.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: And within just a few hours of arriving, the entire
• 9:40
  narrative completely flips.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: It was so fast. Jane Horton, who is the spokesperson
• 9:45
  for the Tucson Police Department. He steps in front of
• 9:48
  the local news cameras that have rushed to the scene,
• 9:50
  and he.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: Puts a hard, definitive stop to the internet rumors.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: He does. He confirms that the bone is indeed human,
• 9:57
  but he declares it a quote prehistory anthropological investigation.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: He explicitly, unambiguously states, this is not a criminal investigation.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: I have to admit when I read that in the
• 10:09
  source material, I experienced serious whiplash.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels like a sudden left turn.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: It does. I really want to dig into the how
• 10:17
  of this, because if I'm playing Devil's advocate here, how
• 10:21
  do police and medical examiners look at a human leg
• 10:23
  bone sitting in the dirt and definitively rule out an
• 10:26
  eighty four year old woman who went missing just three
• 10:28
  months ago.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: It seems impossible to know that quickly exactly.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Why didn't they box it up, maintain a careful chain
• 10:35
  of custody, send it to a state lab, and wait
• 10:37
  six weeks for a modern DNA profile just to be
• 10:39
  absolutely sure.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: That's what people expect from CSI shows right.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: My initial thought was, well, it's the desert, it's sitting
• 10:47
  out in the blinding sun. Doesn't a bone just get
• 10:49
  completely bleached white and dried out in a matter of
• 10:52
  weeks out there?
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: That is such a common assumption.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: Couldn't a recent bone look ancient really quickly?
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: Well, that assumption makes sense intuitively, But the reality of
• 11:02
  forensic taphonomy, which is the scientific study of what happens
• 11:05
  to an organism after death, it is much more complex
• 11:08
  than just sun exposure.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, late it on me.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: So when the anthropologists from the U of A and
• 11:13
  the medical examiner arrived at that wash, they weren't looking
• 11:16
  for a driver's license nearby, and they weren't just looking
• 11:19
  at sun bleaching were they looking at They were looking
• 11:21
  at the internal physical and chemical composition of the bone itself.
• 11:25
  The field reports note that their visual inspection and initial
• 11:29
  tactile tests pointed to significant mineralization.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, so breakdown mineralization for us, because it's not just
• 11:36
  drying out, is it.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: No, not at all. It is a fundamental chemical invasion,
• 11:41
  a chemical invation. Yeah. When a bone sits in the
• 11:43
  earth for a long time, especially in a highly specific
• 11:47
  mineral rich environment like the Sonoran Desert, it undergoes this
• 11:51
  profound exchange. Okay, the organic material inside the bones. We're
• 11:56
  talking the collagen that gives it flexibility, the bone marrow,
• 11:59
  all the pro teenes. That stuff slowly degrades and rots away.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Right, that makes sense.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: And as it rots it leaves behind microscopic voids inside
• 12:08
  the bone structure. They are essentially tiny empty tunnels called
• 12:12
  heversion canals.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, So the bone becomes like a microscopic.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: Sponge, exactly, a microscopic sponge buried in mineral rich soil.
• 12:20
  And whenever it rains, you know, the monsoons and Tucson
• 12:24
  bring these massive sudden inundations of water. That ground water
• 12:27
  percolates through the.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Soil, and the soil there is different.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: Right, very the soil in the Catalina foothills is heavy
• 12:33
  with calcium, carbonate, silica, and iron. Oh, so that mineral
• 12:36
  laden water seeps into the microscopic pores of the bone.
• 12:40
  When the water eventually evaporates in the extreme heat, it
• 12:44
  leaves the solid minerals behind inside the bone structure. Over decades,
• 12:48
  centuries and millennia, this process, which is called permineralization, it
• 12:54
  literally turns the bone into stone.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Wait, so it's fossilizing, Yes.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: It is the early state of fossilization. So, returning to
• 13:02
  the visual inspection at the wash yesterday, right, a bone
• 13:06
  from someone who went missing in February of this year
• 13:09
  would still be highly organic.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Because it hasn't had time for that chemical invasion exactly.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Even if it had been exposed to the harsh sun
• 13:16
  and bleached totally white, even if it had been scavenged
• 13:19
  by coyotes, it would still be relatively lightweight. It would
• 13:23
  still be porous, It would lack that heavy stonele like calcification.
• 13:27
  A trained medical examiner or anthropologist can simply pick up
• 13:31
  a heavily mineralized.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Bone just by holding it.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: Just by holding it, they feel the unnatural rock like
• 13:37
  density in their hand. They observe the extreme weathering patterns
• 13:40
  where the minerals have completely replaced the bone matrix, and
• 13:42
  they know instantly, without a shadow of a doubt, that
• 13:45
  this individual has been deceased for decades, if not centuries.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: That is amazing. The earth itself gives them a definitive timestamp.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: It really does. The environment writes its own history right
• 13:56
  into the cellular structure of the bone. Wow in the
• 13:59
  Arizone of context, when an anthropologist says prehistoric. They're usually
• 14:04
  referring to the pre Columbian era or at the absolute
• 14:07
  very least pre twentieth century.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: So running DNA on it would be pointless.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, taking a sample from a stone heavy, heavily mineralized
• 14:16
  femur and running it through a modern DNA sequencer would
• 14:20
  be completely irrelevant. It would be practically impossible and useless
• 14:25
  for solving a twenty twenty six missing person's case.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: It's incredible science, but you know, stepping back for a moment,
• 14:32
  a single prehistoric bone in a desert known for ancient
• 14:35
  artifacts wouldn't normally cause a national panic.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Now they find them all the time, right.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Or derail a morning news show. To understand why the
• 14:43
  Internet exploded yesterday, why everyone was so primed for this
• 14:46
  to be a tragic breakthrough, we have to rewind the clock.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: We have to look at the context.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: We have to go back over one hundred days and
• 14:51
  look at the chilling, highly technical, and frankly terrifying details
• 14:56
  of Nancy Guthrie's actual disappearance.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: Because the prehistoric bone was merely the spark. The tender
• 15:02
  was the fact that this remains one of the most baffling,
• 15:04
  high stakes and technologically complex unsolved cases in recent memory.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: It really is. We have to examine the baseline timeline
• 15:13
  to understand the gravity of the situation. So let's trace
• 15:15
  those digital and physical footprints.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: Let's do it.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: We are going back to Saturday, January thirty first, twenty
• 15:20
  twenty six. What strikes me so profoundly about the source
• 15:24
  material detailing this specific day is the absolute, almost aggressively
• 15:28
  mundane normality of the evening.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: That's the scariest part, honestly. But establishing the baseline of
• 15:33
  normal is the foundational step in any serious criminological investigation.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Because you can't see what's wrong until you know what's right.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: You cannot identify the anomaly until you have definitively mapped
• 15:44
  the routine.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: So we have Nancy. She's an eighty four year old grandmother.
• 15:48
  She's described as being in good health, highly independent, and
• 15:51
  fiercely close with her family.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: Very active social life.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Yes, the timeline begins at five three two pm. She
• 15:58
  orders an uber to take her to her Annie's house,
• 16:00
  which is also.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: In Tucson, just a normal evening plan.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: They have dinner together, they play board games. It is
• 16:06
  a completely standard, warm family Saturday night. Then at nine
• 16:10
  forty eight pm, her son in law Tomaso Chioni, drives
• 16:13
  her back to her home, and.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Her house is situated near the intersection of East Skyline
• 16:17
  Drive in North Campbell Avenue right yes.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Which is a relatively affluent quiet area. Tamaso drops her
• 16:24
  off in the driveway. He watches the garage door go up,
• 16:27
  he watches Nancy walk inside, and he watches the garage
• 16:30
  door go down.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: And that's it.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: That moment, right there, at roughly nine to fifty pm
• 16:35
  is the very last confirmed physical sighting of Nancy Guthrie
• 16:40
  by another human being.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: Those confirmed tine stamped moments are the anchor points of
• 16:45
  the entire investigation.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: They don't just guess no.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: Detectives don't just take the family's word for it. They
• 16:50
  verify everything. They pull the digital receipt from Uber servers
• 16:53
  establishing the exact five point three to two pm trip.
• 16:57
  They take the sworn eyewitness statement from the sun in
• 16:59
  law at nine four eight pm. Investigators build their entire
• 17:03
  radius out from these anchors.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Because of these verifications, they know with absolute certainty that
• 17:09
  she was alive, safe, and behaving completely normally behind a
• 17:13
  locker garage door at nine to fifty pm, that is.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: The established baseline.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: But then the clock crosses midnight, we move into the
• 17:20
  early dark hours of Sunday, February first, and the timeline
• 17:24
  shifts from mundane eye witness accounts to an incredibly ominous
• 17:29
  narrative told almost entirely through digital breadcrumbs.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: This is where it gets highly technical.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: It does. At one forty seven am, the server logs
• 17:37
  for Nancy's home network showed that her Nest doorbell camera
• 17:40
  is disconnected, and.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: The logs indicate it wasn't just a brief Internet outage
• 17:45
  or a router reset.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: You know right, It didn't just reboot.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: The physical connection to the device was severed.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Twenty five minutes later, at two twelve am, motion surveillance
• 17:54
  software inside the house detect movement.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: Now, there is no immediate video feed available in the
• 17:59
  cloud for the movement because the active subscription for cloud
• 18:02
  storage had.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Lapsed, which happens to so many people.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all the time. The police do manage to recover
• 18:08
  something from the hardware later, which we will get to,
• 18:10
  but at this exact moment in the timeline, there is
• 18:13
  just a digital ping indicating movement in a house where
• 18:15
  an eighty four year old woman should be fast asleep.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: But here's where it gets really interesting, and by interesting
• 18:21
  I mean deeply unsettling. At two twenty eight am, data
• 18:26
  recovered from Nancy's pacemaker application shows that her implanted pacemaker
• 18:31
  permanently lost its connection to her smartphone.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: This is the single data point that truly chills you
• 18:37
  when you understand the mechanics of what it implies.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: I look at this data point and the analogy that
• 18:42
  immediately springs to my mind is the black box on
• 18:45
  a commercial airliner.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: That's a really apt comparison.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: Like when a plane suffers a catastrophic event over the ocean,
• 18:51
  investigators rely on the telemetry data. They look at altitude,
• 18:55
  cabin pressure, engine temperature.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: Right all the technical vital sign.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: And sometimes suddenly all those lines on the graph just
• 19:01
  plummet to zero at the exact same millisecond. The black
• 19:05
  box going dark doesn't tell you who was in the cockpit.
• 19:08
  It doesn't tell you what specific mechanism caused the failure,
• 19:11
  whether it was a bomb, a sudden depressurization, or a
• 19:15
  massive mechanical shear, But it gives you the exact, indisputable,
• 19:19
  down to the millisecond timestamp that a catastrophic event occurred.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Yes, the precise moment of failure.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: So when investigators are looking at this medical telenatry, what
• 19:30
  exactly does a pacemaker disconnect tell them?
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: It provides a horrifyingly precise physical window for the abduction.
• 19:38
  And it all comes down to how modern medical telemetry
• 19:41
  is engineered today.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Okay, walk me through that.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: A contemporary pacemaker isn't just a battery and a wire
• 19:46
  regulating a heartbeat anymore. It hasn't been that way for
• 19:49
  a while. More complex, it is a sophisticated node in
• 19:52
  a digital network. It constantly communicates with a proprietary app
• 19:56
  installed on the patient's smartphone.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Like it's talking to the phone exactly.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: It does this using a protocol called Bluetooth Low Energy
• 20:04
  or bl e ble E.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: The purpose is to continuously send diagnostic data things like
• 20:09
  heart rhythm anomalies, battery life lead impedance directly to the
• 20:13
  patient's cardiologist via the phone's cellular connection.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: So the pacemaker in her chest and the phone on
• 20:19
  her nightstand are constantly shaking hands in the dark. Digitally speaking,
• 20:23
  that's a.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Great way to phrase it. A continuous silent digital tether.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: Now, Bluetooth Low Energy operates on the two point four
• 20:30
  gigahertz frequency band, and it has a very specific physical
• 20:35
  operational range based on signal.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Strength because it's trying to save battery right exactly.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Typically for a medical device conserving battery, that range is
• 20:43
  about thirty feet.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: That's not far at all.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: No, it might stretch a bit further in an open field,
• 20:49
  but inside a house with drywall, wooden studs, and electrical wiring,
• 20:53
  that signal degrades.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Quickly, so it's very localized, very.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: The smartphone app constantly measures the RSS side the received
• 21:01
  signal strength indicator. If the app logs a total permanent
• 21:05
  loss of connection at exactly two point two eight am,
• 21:09
  it indicates one of two specific physical realities, which are
• 21:12
  either the smartphone was suddenly smashed and its antenna destroyed,
• 21:16
  or the physical distance between Nancy's chest were the transmittals
• 21:20
  implanted and the mobile phone exceeded that roughly thirty foot threshold.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: And since we know from the reports that they found
• 21:26
  her phone intact inside the house later.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: It means the phone stayed behind and the pacemaker moved
• 21:31
  out of range. Oh my god, the digital tether snapped.
• 21:35
  When you sequence the available data, a very clear very
• 21:39
  terrifying narrative emerges.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Let's lay out that sequence.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Okay, At one point four to seven am, the perimeter
• 21:45
  is breached and the camera is disabled. Right at two
• 21:48
  point one twelve am, the intruder is inside and movement
• 21:52
  is detected. Okay, at two point two eight am, the
• 21:55
  victim is physically removed from the proximity of her phone
• 21:59
  and taken out.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Of the house. That is terrifying.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: Investigators are presented with a forty one minute window from
• 22:04
  the initial perimeter breach to the extraction of the victim.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: That level of chronological precision is incredibly rare in a
• 22:10
  missing person's case.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: It is almost unheard of most cases. You have a
• 22:14
  window of days, not minutes.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: But it's also incredibly frustrating for investigators.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Isn't it deeply frustrating because, as you noted with your
• 22:22
  black box analogy, it perfectly illuminates exactly when the timeline
• 22:25
  of the crime occurred, but it offers zero data on
• 22:28
  who caused it or where they went next.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: Right, It just tells you when the night vers started exactly,
• 22:34
  and the reality of what happened in that forty one
• 22:36
  minute window was brutally confirmed later that.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: Same day Monday afternoon.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. By late morning on February first, Nancy fails to
• 22:45
  show up for a planned church service. Given her routine,
• 22:49
  Her family is immediately alarmed.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: They knew something was wrong.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: They don't wait around. They call the Pima County Sheriff's
• 22:55
  Department for a welfare check at twelve zero three pm.
• 23:00
  Deputies arrive at the property at twelve fifteen pm and
• 23:03
  it becomes instantly clear that this is not a medical emergency,
• 23:07
  and it's not a case of an elderly woman simply
• 23:09
  wandering off.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: No, they knew immediately.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: They immediately recognized and secure a violent crime scene.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: The physical evidence at the location immediately elevated the response
• 23:18
  from a standard missing person check to a major crimes investigation.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: The deputies find blood smeared on the front door and
• 23:26
  the surrounding porch.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: Area, a clear sign of a struggle.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: They find the nest camera, the one that went offline
• 23:32
  at one four seven am, physically tampered with. It wasn't
• 23:36
  just disconnected from the Wi Fi, it was reportedly pulled
• 23:39
  violently straight from the wall.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: Someone didn't want to be seen.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: And inside the house they find the essential items that
• 23:45
  you absolutely never leave behind if you were leaving a
• 23:48
  house voluntarily. The anchor items, right, They find her phone,
• 23:52
  which totally confirms the pacemaker disconnect theory. They find her
• 23:57
  daily life sustaining medications, and they find her purse and
• 24:01
  personal items.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: And this is where the digital forensics team executes an
• 24:06
  incredible piece of investigative work.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Tell us about that, because this blew my mind.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: Remember how the Nest camera lacked a cloud subscription, meaning
• 24:14
  there was no live video saved to the server.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so there shouldn't be any footage, right.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: Normally, yes, but modern smart home devices often utilize a.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Local buffer like internal memory.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly, they have internal flash memory that cashes a few
• 24:29
  seconds or minutes of data locally before attempting to push
• 24:32
  it to the cloud.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Oh, just in case of a temporary network drop.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a failsafe. So even though the device was
• 24:38
  physically ripped from the wall, the hardware technicians were able
• 24:41
  to extract partial residual image data from that internal chip.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: That is so cool. And what did they find?
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: They found a phantom on tape.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: The source material describes the recovered image as showing a
• 24:54
  masked figure. The suspect is described as wearing a ski mask,
• 24:59
  a backpack, gloves, and is possibly carrying a holstered firearm.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: That single extracted image is the nightmare scenario.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: It definitively escalates the situation. It confirms a violent, premeditated
• 25:12
  home invasion and abduction by an armed, prepared individual.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: So let's look at the board right now, we have
• 25:18
  a lot we do. We have a highly precise, down
• 25:20
  to the minute digital timeline check. We have physical evidence
• 25:24
  blood left at the scene check. We have unknown DNA
• 25:26
  recovered from the property check. We have actual video evidence
• 25:30
  of an armed suspect on paper. If you watch any
• 25:32
  police procedural on television, this seems like a case that
• 25:36
  should be wrapped up in a matter of days. You
• 25:38
  have the times, the DNA, the video.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: The CSI effect makes people expect an immediate arrest.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Right So why over three months later are we sitting
• 25:48
  here in May twenty twenty six and there is no arrest.
• 25:51
  The trail seems to have gone completely cold.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Well, the discrepancy between television expectations and the reality of
• 25:57
  modern policing is just vast.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Having an abundance of data points is not synonymous with
• 26:03
  having actionable, forward moving intelligence.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: Wait, really, more data isn't always better.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: In many ways, an overwhelming amount of data can act
• 26:10
  as friction.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: It slows you down, which brings us to the complexities,
• 26:13
  the stumbling blocks, and the sheer noise of an active,
• 26:17
  high profile investigation. Let's talk about the scale of this operation.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: It is a massive undertaking hee.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Mc County Sheriff Chris Nanos officially declares it in abduction.
• 26:27
  The Guthrie family, who understandably have massive resources in national
• 26:31
  media access, put up a one million dollar reward for
• 26:34
  information leading to Nancy safe return.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: A huge reward.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: The unknown DNA found at the house is uploaded into codis,
• 26:41
  the national database, and then the media starts reporting that
• 26:45
  the family and police have received unverified ransom notes demanding
• 26:50
  payment in bitcoin.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: And this is where the data friction really starts to compound.
• 26:55
  The elements that catapult a case into the national spotlight
• 26:58
  are often the exact same elements that drastically bog down
• 27:02
  the operational pace of the investigation. Aw So well, consider
• 27:06
  the million dollar reward. When you announce a figure that
• 27:09
  large on national television, you don't just get the one
• 27:12
  golden tip from a guilty.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Conscience, right, You get everybody.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: You open the floodgates, the tip lines light up with
• 27:18
  tens of thousands.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: Of calls, which all have to be checked.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Every single one. You get self proclaimed psychics calling in
• 27:24
  from three states away. Of course, you get well meaning,
• 27:28
  hypervigilant neighbors reporting a suspicious white van they saw three
• 27:31
  weeks ago that turns out to be an Amazon delivery driver,
• 27:35
  thus noise. You get opportunistic scammers trying to game the
• 27:38
  system for a payout. And the reality of police work
• 27:41
  is that investigators have to meticulously log, vet, and clear
• 27:45
  almost every single one of those leads, because.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: If you dismiss a tip is noise and it turns
• 27:51
  out to be the real lead.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: The entire case collapses due to negligence.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: The defense attorney would have a field day.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly the vetting process consumes hundreds of And then you
• 28:01
  introduce the complexity of bitcoin ransom notes.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: Oh man, the crypto element.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: Tracing cryptocurrency is a highly specialized, incredibly labyrinthine process.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Okay, let me see if I can wrap my head
• 28:13
  around the bitcoin tracing. It's often described as an anonymous currency,
• 28:16
  but from what I understand, every transaction is actually recorded
• 28:20
  on a public ledger called the blockchain.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: Right, that is correct. It's public.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: So it's like trying to follow a specific drop of
• 28:25
  water as it moves through a complex plumbing system. The
• 28:30
  pipes are all made of transparent glass. Anyone can see
• 28:32
  the water moving from pipe AA to pipe B, but
• 28:35
  the system constantly changes shape, splits into thousands of smaller pipes,
• 28:39
  and you have no idea who actually owns the building
• 28:42
  the pipes are in. Is that accurate?
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: That is an excellent way to visualize the ut XO
• 28:48
  or unspent transaction output model.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Of the blockchain UTXO.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, you can see the specific wallet address the
• 28:54
  ransom is demanding funds be sent to. The glass pipe
• 28:58
  is transparent, so what's the problem. The problem is attribution.
• 29:02
  The abductor isn't using a wallet registered to their real
• 29:05
  name at a regulated US bank, right, They will likely
• 29:08
  push the bitcoin through a cryptocurrency mixer or tumbler.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: What does a tumblr do?
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: It essentially takes your drop of water, throws it into
• 29:16
  a massive spinning vat with millions of other drops of water,
• 29:19
  and then spits a different drop out the other side
• 29:21
  to a new glass pipe.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, so you completely lose the trail, you.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: Lose the direct link. Furthermore, the IP addresses associated with
• 29:29
  these wallets are often routed through servers located in non
• 29:32
  extrallition countries.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, of course, places.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: Where US subpoenas hold absolutely no legal weight.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: So figuring out if the ransom note is real or
• 29:41
  if it's just a cyber criminal in another hemisphere who
• 29:45
  saw Savannah Guthrie crying on television and decided to extort
• 29:48
  the family requires an immense amount of specialized digital forensic work.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: It requires massive federal resources. The FBI's Cyberdivision has to
• 29:57
  get involved.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: They bring in the heavy hitters.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: They have to issue in ourn national subpoenas, analyze network traffic,
• 30:03
  and try to break the obfuscation layers. It widens the
• 30:06
  investigative nets so drastically that it diverts energy away from
• 30:10
  the physical ground search and Tucson.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: The digital investigation slows down the physical forward momentum exactly.
• 30:16
  And speaking of federal resources, the source material highlights a massive,
• 30:21
  very public institutional friction between the agencies involved.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: The politics of a high profile case.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it gets messy. Now we have public statements indicating
• 30:29
  a serious turf war between the local authority sheriff Chris
• 30:33
  Nanos and the federal authority FBI Director Cash.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Battel, two very powerful figures.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: Right there are claims coming from the federal side that
• 30:41
  FBI agents were intentionally quote kept out of the investigation
• 30:46
  by local deputies during those critical first.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Few days, such as a huge accusation massive.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: The PA McCanny Sheriff's office vehemently disputes that narrative. Of course,
• 30:56
  the politics get so heated and toxic that there are
• 30:59
  even internal no confidence votes happening within the local department's
• 31:03
  ranks regarding the leadership's handling of the case.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: It becomes a circus, it really does.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: I have to ask, how does interagency tension of this
• 31:11
  magnitude affect the actual boots on the ground When the
• 31:14
  brass is fighting on cable news and issuing dueling press releases,
• 31:18
  does that friction trickle down to the evidence room? Like
• 31:22
  are detectives hiding files from each other?
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: From a practical criminological perspective, the trickle down effect is
• 31:28
  very real, but it usually manifests differently than the Hollywood
• 31:31
  trope of detectives hiding files from federal agents.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, so it's not like the movie.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: Not Usually the actual line level detectives working the scene,
• 31:40
  the lab technicians swabbing the campered nest camera for DNA,
• 31:44
  the digital forensic experts analyzing the pacemaker logs. These are
• 31:49
  highly trained professionals.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: They just want to solve the case exactly. Yeah.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: Behind closed doors, they are usually cooperating, seamlessly, sharing database
• 31:59
  access and collaborating on lab time. The actual scientific work continues.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: So what's the real damage then?
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: The real devastation of these public spats is the collateral
• 32:09
  damage to public perception.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: They destroy the illusion of competence.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: They systematically dismantle public trust. When the public turns on
• 32:17
  the evening news and sees the local sheriff and the
• 32:20
  director of the FBI engaging in a bitter jurisdictional dispute,
• 32:24
  the immediate, unavoidable perception is that the investigation is severely botched.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: It looks terrible.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: The narrative shifts from law enforcement is hunting a dangerous
• 32:33
  criminal to law enforcement is incompetent in fighting amongst themselves.
• 32:37
  And when the public loses faith in the integrity and
• 32:40
  efficacy of the official investigation, they feel compelled to take
• 32:44
  matters into their own.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: Hands, which is exactly what happened here.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: This institutional friction acts as the primary fuel for the
• 32:51
  massive amateur sleuthing phenomenon we're seeing in this case.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: Which loops us right back to the beginning of our
• 32:58
  deep dive back to ajd W News out in the
• 33:01
  one hundred degree heat with a gimbal and a bottle of.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: Water doing his own search.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: He is out there streaming because he and thousands of
• 33:08
  his viewers genuinely feel like they need to supplement the
• 33:11
  official quote failed work of the authorities.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: And they mean, well, they really do.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: They do. But the sources point out a very specific,
• 33:18
  highly troubling mechanical detail about these volunteer search efforts. It
• 33:23
  highlights how public involvement is a massive double edged sword.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: The reports note that while official, highly trained search and
• 33:30
  rescue teams were combing the desert grids, their progress constantly
• 33:34
  halted because they kept finding discarded gloves, water bottles, and debris.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: This is where the physical reality of the true crime
• 33:41
  machine hits the dirt.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: What happens when they find that stuff?
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: Well, when an official evidence technician is walking a search
• 33:48
  grid and they spot a discarded glove near a crime scene,
• 33:52
  especially a crime scene where the extracted video explicitly shows
• 33:57
  the suspect wearing gloves, the entire operation has to halt.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: They can't just kick it aside and say, oh, it's
• 34:02
  probably a volunteers.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. They have to treat it as a
• 34:06
  potential piece of the puzzle. The protocol is rigid, walk
• 34:10
  me through it. They have to stop the line search.
• 34:12
  They have to photograph the glove insitu.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Just where it lies right.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: They have to carefully bag it, tag it, establish a
• 34:19
  chain of custody, transport it back to the evidence locker,
• 34:23
  and submit it to the state crime lab to be
• 34:25
  swabbed for touch, DNA or cellular material.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: It sounds like it takes a lot of time.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: It does, and then the lab technicians have to prioritize
• 34:32
  processing that swab.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: And a month later the lab results come back and
• 34:36
  the DNA profile belongs to a well meaning accountant from
• 34:39
  Phoenix who drove down to volunteer on a weekend citizen
• 34:43
  search party, got hot and dropped his glove exactly.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: The volunteers, in their desperate, genuine desire to help find
• 34:51
  that Nancy Guthrie, are actively shedding their own DNA dropping
• 34:55
  trash and fundamentally altering the physical.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Landscape that is so ca productive.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: They are unintentionally contaminating the very crime scene they're trying
• 35:04
  to protect. They create a massive backlog of false positives
• 35:08
  at the crime lab.
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: And that hurts the real investigation.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: It means the DNA swabs that might actually belong to
• 35:14
  the masked suspect are sitting in a queue waiting to
• 35:17
  be tested behind a dozen volunteer water bottles.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: It creates a fascinating, heavy friction point for anyone listening
• 35:24
  to this right now who consumes this kind of media.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: It forces some self reflection.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: It does. Are we the true crime consuming public, people
• 35:32
  watching the live streams, sharing the Reddit post, demanding updates,
• 35:35
  and generating pressure. Are we actually helping keep these cases
• 35:38
  in the spotlight so they don't go cold that's the hope,
• 35:41
  right Or are we creating the noise? Are we actively
• 35:45
  hindering the mechanics of the justice system by contaminating the
• 35:48
  physical evidence pools with our trash and the digital evidence
• 35:52
  pools with our unverified theories.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: It is the defining paradox of the modern true crime era.
• 35:57
  It really is a paradox the spotlight of public attention
• 36:00
  is absolutely necessary to apply pressure and keep resources allocated
• 36:04
  to a case, But the ambient heat generated by that
• 36:07
  spotlight is often so intense that it melts the very
• 36:10
  evidence required to solve it.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: Wow that friction on the ground, the way modern volunteers
• 36:15
  leave physical traces that confuse and delay search teams today,
• 36:19
  it mirrors another kind of friction we see in this landscape.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: A much older friction.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: Yes, just as amateur sleuths leave traces that muddy the investigation,
• 36:28
  the ancient inhabitants of this exact same land left physical
• 36:31
  traces that do the.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: Exact same thing, which is exactly what triggered yesterday's Internet
• 36:36
  melt dewn.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Precisely, the desert itself is a major character in this story.
• 36:40
  It is the intersection of deep time and present tragedy.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: To fully grasp the context of yesterday's discovery, we have
• 36:46
  to zoom way out geologically and historically, take us back
• 36:49
  the Tucson area, the Catalina Foothills, the vast expanses of
• 36:53
  the Sonoran Desert. This is not just an empty expanse
• 36:56
  of dirt, mesquite bushes, and saguaro cacti.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: It looks empty, but it's not.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: It is a massive, sprawling, ancient repository of human history,
• 37:05
  specifically the Hohokum culture and even earlier archaic indigenous peoples engineered, thrived,
• 37:13
  and lived in this specific region for thousands of years.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: The source material notes that anthropologists from the University of
• 37:19
  Arizona are routinely almost regularly consulted in these modern police
• 37:24
  investigations because unearthing ancient remains happens constantly.
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: It is a frequent operational reality for Tucson.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: Law enforcement because they lived right there.
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the Hohokum were brilliant engineers. They built massive, complex
• 37:36
  canal systems to manage the water in the Tucson Basin.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: Wait, they built canals in the desert.
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely hundreds of miles of them to capture runoff.
• 37:45
  They lived near the waterways, and consequently, their burial sites
• 37:48
  and cremation areas were often located in the floodplains and
• 37:51
  surrounding terraces.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: Ah, I see where this is going.
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: The geological mechanics of the Sonoran Desert are uniquely aggressive.
• 37:58
  The region experiences long, intense periods of arid dryness followed
• 38:03
  by violent, concentrated monsoon seasons in the late summer.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: And when those monsoons hit the dry washes like the
• 38:10
  one AJW News was walking in, they don't just get muddy.
• 38:13
  They fill with raging, violent torrents of water.
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: Exactly flash floods, millions of gallons of water moving at
• 38:21
  high velocity.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: It has to rip up the ground.
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: That water causes massive, rapid, violent soil erosion. The banks
• 38:28
  of the washes are carved out tons of dirt or displaced,
• 38:31
  and the topography is physically altered.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Overnight, so it's constantly changing.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: The desert is essentially shifting its skin. It is not
• 38:38
  an empty static canvas waiting for a modern crime to
• 38:42
  be painted on it. It is a highly active, constantly
• 38:45
  churning environment.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: And because indigenous populations have lived and buried their dead
• 38:50
  in this specific dirt for millennia, that violent monsoon erosion
• 38:54
  is constantly unearthing ancient burial grounds. The earth is forcefully
• 38:58
  pushing its history up to the surface.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: It's a profound realization. And when that ancient history breaks
• 39:03
  the surface, like it did on a YouTube live stream yesterday,
• 39:06
  it immediately shifts the investigation onto a completely different legal track.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: It's no longer a police matter.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Right, it triggers the protocols in the past.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: Once the police declare it a non criminal prehistoric site,
• 39:18
  the University of Arizona anthropology team takes over. They take
• 39:22
  custody of the remains.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: And what do they do with them?
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: They will utilize morphological analysis looking at the specific shape
• 39:29
  and characteristics of the bone or radiocarbon dating to determine
• 39:33
  its precise age.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: To see exactly how old it is.
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: Given the location and the history of the Two Song basin,
• 39:40
  it is highly likely they will confirm the remains have
• 39:43
  indigenous cultural affiliation. And when they figure that out, what
• 39:46
  happens the moment that determination is made? It triggers federal
• 39:49
  protocols under a law called nag PR the Native American
• 39:53
  Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: So NAGPRA isn't just a museum boxing up a bone
• 39:59
  and handing out over. It's a complex legal mechanism, isn't it.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: It is a rigorous, mandatory federal process enacted in nineteen ninety.
• 40:07
  It requires institutions that receive federal funding to meticulously inventory
• 40:12
  Native American human remains and funerary objects.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: They have to track everything.
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: If the u of A determines this spemur is indigenous.
• 40:19
  They cannot simply put it in a display case or
• 40:22
  a storage.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: Drawer, right, that would be highly unethical and illegal.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: They are legally mandated to consult with the culturally affiliated
• 40:29
  modern Native American tribes in this region, likely the Tohono
• 40:33
  odom Nation or the Pasquayaki Tribe okay. A notice is
• 40:36
  published in the Federal Register and a formal process of
• 40:40
  repatriation begins, ensuring the remains are returned to the descendants
• 40:44
  and treated with the cultural and spiritual dignity they require.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: So it's a completely different path.
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: It operates on a completely different legal, ethical, and procedural
• 40:52
  track than a Pima County criminal investigation.
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: I just cannot get over the incredible jarring justice of
• 41:00
  this entire narrative. It is surreal. Picture Savannah Guthrie right.
• 41:04
  She is a modern media icon.
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: A staple of morning television.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: She is sitting under the bright artificial studio lights of
• 41:12
  the Today Show set at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
• 41:15
  She's surrounded by teleprompters broadcasting to millions of people via
• 41:19
  satellites orbiting the planet.
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: The pinnacle of modern technology and media exactly, and.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: She has to abruptly stand up and leave that high tech,
• 41:27
  highly controlled environment because an ancient, heavily mineralized bone belonging
• 41:32
  to someone who walked the earth hundreds maybe thousands of
• 41:35
  years ago, was violently washed out of the dirt by
• 41:38
  a monsoon and filmed by a guy with a smartphone.
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: It is poetry.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: It perfectly, almost poetically illustrates how geography simply refuses to
• 41:47
  be ignored. It really does the land hold onto its history,
• 41:51
  and it forcefully physically interacts with modern society.
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: Geography remains destiny, even in the era of five G
• 41:57
  and satellite uplinks.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Wow yeah, yes. But while we can sit here and
• 42:02
  analyze this intersection of deep time and digital media as
• 42:05
  a fascinating sociological phenomenon, we have to acknowledge the devastating,
• 42:09
  harsh reality of these desert searches.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: We can't forget the human element.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: For us. It is an interesting case study for the
• 42:15
  Guthrie family. It is an agonizing, unending psychological torture.
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: It has to be exhausting.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: Prehistoric mineralized bones and discarded modern volunteer gloves, both of
• 42:25
  these things serve the exact same function in the investigation.
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: They are false leads, they are friction.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: The psychological roller coaster must be unbearable.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: I can't imagine you.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: Are sitting by the phone for over one hundred days.
• 42:36
  It rings, the police tell you a human bone was
• 42:39
  just found on a live stream a few miles from
• 42:41
  your mother's house.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: Your heart just stops.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: You brace yourself for the worst. You think this is it.
• 42:46
  The terrible waiting is finally over.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: Even if it's bad news. It's an answer yes.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: And then three hours later the medical examiner comes back
• 42:55
  and says, never mind. The teponomy shows it's a thousand
• 42:58
  years old. The whiplash, the initial fleeting relief that it
• 43:02
  isn't your mother, is immediately swallowed whole by the crushing
• 43:06
  despair that you are back to square one.
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: The investigation hasn't moved an inch.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: The psychological toll of that cycle repeating over and over
• 43:14
  again is unimaginably cruel.
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: That grim reality brings us to the ultimate conclusion of
• 43:19
  our analysis today.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: Where do things stand right now?
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: As we record this on Friday May eight, twenty twenty six,
• 43:26
  the frenzied digital explosion of yesterday morning has already faded
• 43:29
  into the background.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: The Internet moves so fast.
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: The prehistoric bone, which momentarily paralyzed the Internet and derailed
• 43:37
  network television, has been properly categorized as an archaeological footnote.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: That's the blood.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: The University of Arizona will handle the remains with the
• 43:45
  respect and legal diligence required under EDGPA, and the Internet
• 43:50
  has already moved on to the next trend.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: But the main storyline, the chilling tragedy that brought the
• 43:55
  cameras to that arid wash in the first place, remains
• 43:59
  entirely unresolved.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: The investigation into the violent abduption of Nancy Guthrie is
• 44:04
  still highly active.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: It's not a cold case yet. No.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: The forensic technicians are still analyzing the unknown DNA recovered
• 44:11
  from the scene. They are still try to squeeze more
• 44:13
  data out of that tampered nest camera.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: The FBI Cyber Division is still attempting to pierce the
• 44:19
  blockchain obfuscation of the ransom notes.
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: They are still hunting. The Pima County Sheriff's Office is
• 44:24
  still asking the public for actionable tips.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: Because the brutal, undeniable fact remains. Nancy Guthrie is still missing.
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: Beneath all the complex forensic science, the bitter interagency politics,
• 44:37
  and the chaotic theater of internet true crime sluicing, there
• 44:40
  is a real family enduring an unending nightmare.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: We can't lose sight of that.
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: The source material anchors this entire saga beautifully. With a
• 44:48
  direct quote from the family's latest press conference, they simply said,
• 44:53
  we believe our mom is still out there.
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: That core resilience, that desperate hope is the human engine
• 44:59
  driving this entire ordeal. It absolutely is so. After synthesizing
• 45:03
  all of this, the taphonomy, the digital forensics, the true
• 45:07
  crime ecosystem, what is the ultimate takeaway for the listener today?
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: The essential takeaway is that in a modern world defined
• 45:15
  by absolute information overload, your sharpest, most vital tools are
• 45:19
  critical thinking and immen's patience.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: We'll need more of that.
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: High profile emotionally charged cases, by their very nature generate
• 45:27
  an intense, almost deafeniting amount of noise, like we saw
• 45:29
  yesterday live streams from the desert, frantic reddit threads, unverified cryptocurrency,
• 45:34
  ransom notes, even the unearthing of ancient bones. It is
• 45:38
  all noise.
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: So what's the signal?
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: Methodical scientific analysis rigid chain of custody and the slow,
• 45:45
  grueling establishment of a verified timeline. That is the signal.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: The boring stuff is the importancetuff.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: Exactly when the Internet is screaming at you that a
• 45:54
  case is solved based on a grainy video of a
• 45:56
  dirt wash, take a breath, step back, and wait for
• 46:00
  the science to speak.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: That is fantastic advice. Before we wrap up, I want
• 46:05
  to leave you, the listener, with one final provocative thought
• 46:08
  to mullover as you go about your day.
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: Oh I'm curious.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: We've spent this entire deep dive talking about two radically
• 46:14
  different types of evidence. Think about the physical legacy of
• 46:17
  the Hohookum people.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: The bones in the desert.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Yes, they're bones, resting in the desert dirt, slowly absorbing
• 46:23
  casium carbonate and silica over centuries, literally permenalizing and turning
• 46:28
  to stone, waiting patiently to be unearthed by the elements.
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: That is a physical fossil.
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: It is the traditional tangible footprint of human existence on
• 46:37
  this planet.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Now, compare that to the legacy of Nancy Guthrie's
• 46:41
  final known moments of normalcy. Okay, the evidence isn't physical.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: Not at all.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: It is a severed Wi Fi connection logged on a
• 46:48
  Nest camera server at one forty seven am. It is
• 46:51
  a Bluetooth signal between a pacemaker and a smartphone snapping
• 46:55
  in the dark at two point two eight am.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: It's all data.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: We are actively rapidly transitioning as a species. We are
• 47:03
  moving away from leaving physical fossils in the dirt, and
• 47:06
  we are transitioning into leaving digital ghosts in the cloud.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: It represents a fundamental paradigm shift in how human existence
• 47:13
  and human tragedy is recorded.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: Thousands of years from now, when the anthropologists of the
• 47:19
  distant future are trying to understand our modern civilization, they
• 47:22
  aren't just going to be walking through dry washes looking
• 47:25
  for our mineralized bone.
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: Well, They'll be digging through servers.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: They're going to be trying to decipher our disconnected server logs.
• 47:31
  They will be looking at the sudden gaps in our
• 47:33
  telemetry data, the severed bluetooth handshakes, to understand how we lived,
• 47:38
  how we loved, and how we vanished.
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: It's completely different kind of archaeology.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder if the Internet goes dark tomorrow,
• 47:45
  what will your digital footprint say about your final moments.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: A truly haunting question to consider when you step into.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: The muddy waters of the modern world. The X ray
• 47:54
  machine is definitely broken. The picture is never clear. We
• 47:59
  just have to hope the sign no evasially cuts through
• 48:01
  the noise.