As hundreds of federal and local agents scoured the Arizona desert and followed potential leads in the nearly two weeks since Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her affluent neighborhood, the families of other missing persons are being reminded how elusive answers can be.
On the one hand, families who spoke to The Associated Press share the deep grief that Nancy Guthrie’s children, including well-known “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, have expressed publicly.
On the other hand, people like Tonya Miller — whose mother disappeared under suspicious circumstances in Missouri in 2019 — say they feel frustrated as they watch seemingly endless resources flood into the search for Guthrie.
“Families like ours, who just have your regular people missing, have to fight to get any help at all,” Miller, 44, said.
Miller’s mother, Betty Miller, is one of thousands of people who are listed as abducted each year, according to federal statistics. In most cases, families like Tonya Miller say it’s a full-time job advocating for a fair and thorough investigation.
The Guthrie investigation was flooded with resources
The country has been gripped by the apparent abduction of Nancy Guthrie after authorities said they believe she was taken against her will. People in her neighborhood tied yellow ribbons to the tree to show their support.
Several news outlets reported that they had received ransom notes, and the Guthries expressed their willingness to pay — although it is not known if the ransom notes demanding money with deadlines that have already passed were genuine.
Meanwhile, several hundred detectives and agents are now assigned to the Nancy Guthrie investigation, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said.
FBI spokesman Connor Hagan declined to say how many of those agents were federal law enforcement and how many were already assigned to Arizona. It also did not clarify how the federal agency prioritizes different missing persons cases.
However, he said agents from the Critical Incident Response Group, technical experts and intelligence analysts are working to bring Guthrie home. There is also a 24-hour command post where dozens of agents review the 13,000 tips that have come in from the public, among other responsibilities, according to an agency post.
Abductions are rare
The vast majority of people who go missing are believed to be runaways – not abducted or abducted.
Throughout 2024, the last year the National Crime Intelligence Center published data, more than 530,000 missing person records were entered. By the end of the year, just over 90,000 cases remained unsolved on that list – some dating back decades.
About 95% of the hundreds of thousands of cases filed in 2024 were believed to be runaways and only 1% were listed as kidnapped.
Often, the abductor is a parent who does not have legal custody of a child, the report said. It is even rarer for someone to be kidnapped by a stranger.
Disproportionally black and indigenous
The FBI names five abducted or missing persons, including Nancy Guthrie, from Arizona in its online database of 125 missing or abducted persons. All five Arizonans are listed as Native American or otherwise disappeared from tribal communities except Guthrie.
This racial trend is true for the rest of the country as well.
A disproportionate number of people of color and indigenous people were among those kidnapped in 2024, according to the National Crime Reporting Center report. About a third of the 533,936 missing persons listed as abducted in 2024 were black, even though the US Census reports that only 13% of the US population is black. Similarly, nearly 3% of missing persons listed as abducted were Indigenous, compared to 1.4% of people who are Indigenous in the US.
“Every person deserves to be safe, and when someone is missing, there should be an immediate, coordinated and effective response,” said Lucy Simpson, executive director of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre. “For many Native women, longstanding gaps in resources, coordination and systemic support for Tribal Nations have made prevention and response difficult.”
There are no answers for families
Experts said that sometimes the focus on high-profile cases can be a major obstacle to law enforcement operations. But Savannah Guthrie’s celebrity status has also garnered vast resources from the federal and local government — including a $100,000 FBI reward for information that leads to her whereabouts or the arrest and conviction of whoever took her.
That’s in stark contrast, Miller said, to the lack of help she received in Sullivan, Missouri, where she had to use her time and money to search for her mother, who was last seen in her apartment in the town of about 7,000 people. A box of Betty Miller’s prescribed fentanyl patches was missing from the apartment, and her eyeglasses were left on an armchair, Tonya Miller said. There was a massive scratch on her mother’s front door that wasn’t there before.
The Sullivan Police Department did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday.
Despite these suspicious circumstances, local police did not treat her mother’s apartment as a crime scene, Tonya Miller said. He had to beg them to take fingerprints and often had to urge them to follow tips from the public. In the weeks that followed, Tonya Miller organized search parties, printed fliers and held fundraisers to raise a $20,000 reward for her mother.
Tonya Miller said it became harder and harder as the years went by to know how to find her mother. She has written letters to elected officials at all levels of government, including President Donald Trump.
“I feel so helpless,” Miller said, “because you just don’t know what to do anymore.”
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Riddle is a member of The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative Corps. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercover issues.