The influencer circus around Nancy Guthrie’s home

Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for over a month now. While the investigation remains active, with no new breaks over the past several weeks, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona has returned some of its police officers back to their previous positions. The media circus outside of Nancy’s house left with them.

That isn’t the case for everybody, however. There are social media influencers still milling around the missing Guthrie’s home, waiting for a break in the case. And they’re not just waiting — but trying to actually solve the case. They’re looking for clues while their followers give their own theories that can verge into outrageous. 

Slate’s Luke Winkie told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that he “thinks people think that this case could be solved despite the fact that it’s not, and that has driven a lot of the speculation.” 

Below is an excerpt of Winkie’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell us where you went and tell us what it looked like.

I flew into Phoenix, Arizona, jumped in a rental car, took out my phone, and I tapped in Nancy Guthrie’s address. I drove to Tucson, about an hour and a half away, all pretty ordinary. And then I took this one right turn onto a street, and immediately, there were all these cars parked on the side of the road. There were drones overhead — media people just kind of wandering around. There’s people filming front-facing camera videos and talking to their streaming setups. There’s not a police barricade or anything. Anyone can just show up there to cover the case. 

Is there something about this Nancy Guthrie case that is particularly potent for these true crime tribes? Is it just that her daughter’s super famous?

This is a galactically famous person, almost like in the subconscious of America. And we live in kind of a low trust culture right now, and I think people are maybe more eager to believe that maybe the sheriff doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe the FBI has bungled this. So maybe you’re more inclined to think that a couple YouTubers might be getting to the bottom of something or are focusing on something that authorities out there have missed.

Did you get a sense being out there how much people wanted to solve this case versus how much they just wanted it to drag on for the views?

I can’t say that the influencers wanted it to drag on for the engagement, but I do think that the longer it went on, in some ways that was more validating for some of the influencers, in the sense that it let them kind of exist within this narrative, that I’m the one that’s going to be able to solve this. I remember there was this one guy, Jonathan Lee Riches, JLR, he goes by, and the longer I was out there, his content stopped being so much about Nancy Guthrie and started being about [the authorities]: “I understand people have to have health and fitness, but would you go — like if you’re the sheriff — would you go to the gym and work out, just like, the next day when Nancy goes missing? He’s been there for days, like working out in the morning.”

What’s funny about that is here we are a month and a couple of days out from Nancy Guthrie being abducted, and none of them have figured it out! What are the influencers doing out there?

“The top guy out there, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 concurrent views of people just staring at a static [shot] of Nancy Guthrie’s house.”

Most influencers are literally just setting up a camera in front of her house and talking to a chat box that is filled with people that are tuning in to basically stare at Nancy Guthrie’s house and wait for updates to trickle in, or to share random theories they saw on Twitter, or to pass along rumors. 

And you might think, why would anyone tune into that? [But] clearly there is a market for this. The top guy out there, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 concurrent views of people just staring at a static [shot] of Nancy Guthrie’s house. I talked to another guy out there who’s from California; he drove out there and his reasoning [was]: No one was taking the night shift.

How different is that, I guess, from CNN being out there and not breaking any new news?

This is the thing I found myself thinking about a lot, because you are right. The engagement [from the audience] is really good; you were covering the biggest story in the world, and if you are in the game of true crime, this is where you want to be. You have kind of the veneer of giving the people what they want. I’m out here covering this story and piping it to the people that trust me on true crime. 

I didn’t get a great sense that ultimately what these influencers were doing and what these cable news entities were doing were especially different. I think at the end of the day, everyone was sort of milling around Nancy Guthrie’s house waiting for the sheriff to show up to make their statements.

You could say they’re not hurting anyone, but they kind of are — because haven’t they gassed up certain theories to the detriment of alleged suspects who weren’t even suspects?

A good example is the sheriff, when I was out there, made a statement kind of reiterating that they had ruled out Nancy Guthrie’s immediate family as suspects in this investigation. And that’s because there’s been all this speculation that someone close to Nancy Guthrie might’ve been the person to abduct her.

And I talked to one guy out there who was a true crime streamer, and he told me, “Well, I go about things a different way. I like to have direct interaction with my viewers. So when the sheriff put out that statement, I put a poll in my chat saying like, Hey, do you believe the sheriff that her family had nothing to do with it? And in that poll everyone said that, No, I think their family still had something to do with it.” 

It wasn’t like he was taking charge of saying, No, guys, listen, we can’t be talking about that, because the authorities ruled them out. They were still willing to kind of engage in that kind of speculation, which you could say is a little bit damaging and not necessarily helpful to solving the case. 

It’s like doing your own research about vaccines, except you could ruin someone’s life, right?

I was talking to this guy who was an influencer, and we were talking about how streamers like him get accused of passing along misinformation. He had starred in an Inside Edition feature about how he and these other influencers were putting out these rumors, and how the police want them gone. I expected him to push back hard against the idea that he was spreading misinformation. And he did that a little bit, but that wasn’t really the thrust of his defense. 

Instead, he told me that, Listen, I’m going to get things wrong. But I’m a true crime content creator, and that’s what makes true crime fun. To come up with a rumor and a theory and talk about that and explore it, and maybe it later [gets] debunked — that is kind of what we do here in true crime. The next day he was going to go investigate a golf course, because some of his viewers thought that Nancy Guthrie’s body might be stowed away in this golf course. I was chilled about how much I related to what he was saying, and how icky it felt, nonetheless.