Nancy Guthrie update: Former FBI agent explains why case details are being withheld: 'would light a fire'

Former FBI agent says the lack of progress likely means investigators are dealing with many leads that looked promising but led nowhere.

Nancy Guthrie has been missing for 87 days. The 84-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie was last seen on January 31 at her Tucson home in Arizona. Since then, there had been no breakthrough in the investigation and no suspect has been identified.

Ex- FBI agent says promising leads may have slowed progress in Nancy Guthrie case. (REUTERS)

Retired FBI Special Agent Steve Moore, speaking with NewsNation's Brian Entin in late April 2026 has offered some insight into why the case has been difficult to crack.

"If they had significant information, they would have more progress on the case," Moore told NewsNation. "I think what you would find is if you could go in and get briefed by four or five different agents who are working it, you would find so much information that ultimately turned out to be of little or no value, but seemed so, so promising at the time."

He also warned that making certain details public could do more harm than good. "It would probably light a fire on social media if the public knew these things and it would light a fire that would not be helpful," Moore added.

How many people were involved in the abduction?

One of the biggest open questions in the case is whether Nancy Guthrie was abducted by a single person or a group.

Moore, who previously criticized early ransom negotiations in the case as acting in "bad faith," said he believes it is statistically more likely that more than one person was involved, though he acknowledged that there could be one attacker also.

"Some people very, very rightly say that it's hard to imagine a single person doing this. But at the same time, you can't put your weight down on the ice," Moore said on the Brian Entin Investigates podcast on April 28.

“I think both are possible. I think it's more likely statistically that it was two people. But when you go back and you look at a lot of the famous kidnapping cases in history, occasionally they are and frequently they are sole individuals,” he added.

However, Ex-FBI profiler Jim Clemente reached the different conclusion.

He said that if there had been more than one person, Nancy likely wouldn’t have been able to fight back at all.

"If there were two people, you would think one of them would have control of her, complete control of her inside the house and brought her outside and would not have lost that control," he explained on the Brian Entin's April 23 episode. "But here, she's clearly on the ground coughing this blood up."

He also mentioned that there were no signs of multiple shoe prints in the blood, which supports his view: "There's no evidence to me that there are more than one offender here. If there was three different shoe print patterns in the blood stains… that would tell me something. I don't see it. I'm not aware of that evidence."

For now, there have been no new developments in the case and the investigation is still ongoing.