Before the sun rose over a barren desert landscape, YouTuber Jimmy Williams watched as hundreds of subscribers took to his online chat room.
A laptop balanced precariously on his knees, his iPhone framed by a ring light, he spends several hours a day dissecting the details of Nancy Guthrie’s sudden disappearance with his rapidly growing audience of fellow true crime enthusiasts.
Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona, and authorities believe she was taken against her will in the early hours of 1 February.
Williams is just one of dozens of curious observers and amateur sleuths who have descended on the area.
The influx of spectators has turned a quiet mid-size city, popular with retirees, into a global media spectacle.
Police have yet to identify any suspects in her abduction, and her daughter – the Today show presenter Savannah Guthrie – has repeatedly begged the public for help in finding her mother.
A reassuring face on morning television in the US, Savannah Guthrie now finds herself at the same intersection of hope and dread that has defined many of her interviewees.
This time, however, the roles have been reversed, and instead of asking questions she is the one awaiting answers.
Breakfast television affords its presenters a special sense of intimacy with their audience, with segments often focusing on human-interest stories.
Savannah Guthrie spent her childhood in Tucson, and in November she even invited people into her mum’s home for a segment on the Today Show.
Kelly Himes lives several miles from Nancy Guthrie’s home in the shadow of the Catalina Mountains. Like a growing number of Tucson residents, she felt compelled to stop and say a prayer alongside the growing array of flowers at the end of her driveway.
“Nancy’s the same age as my mum, the same height as my mum, and she’s got the same hair,” Himes told the BBC. “She lives alone just like my mum does. This is someone who could be anybody’s mother.”
Savannah Guthrie’s fame has proved to be a double-edged sword. As well as drawing an unprecedented amount of attention and resources to the search for her mother, it has also inspired feverish speculation and given rise to a string of false leads.
Two weeks after Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance investigators revealed they had found several gloves, with the closest discovered about two miles from her home.
The sheriff’s department also said media reports that a glove was found inside her home or on the property were inaccurate.
To Williams’ growing audience speculation over the case only heightens its intrigue.
Since Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, Williams’ YouTube channel Dollyvision has gained more than 8,000 new subscribers.
Interest in Nancy’s disappearance was “massive”, he said.
“You expect kidnappings to involve cash in a bag dropped off somewhere remote, and then the police turn up and arrest everyone. This is different. This is like a ‘new age’ of kidnapping.”
The days of ransom demands made up of letters cut from the pages of a magazine seem a thing of the past.
Secure servers, secret IP addresses and untraceable Bitcoin accounts have changed the face of one of the world’s oldest crimes, but a former FBI hostage negotiator, Chip Massey, said he believed Nancy Guthrie’s kidnappers would soon be caught.
Referring to the video images of a masked man on her doorstep shortly before she disappeared, he said somebody somewhere would recognise the suspect based either on their behaviour or their body language.
“The attention this case has generated is unprecedented,” he said, “and while a mask can conceal a face it can’t conceal a person.”
Missing person flyers featuring pictures of Nancy’s smiling face, combined with motorway billboards promoting the FBI’s tip line have made this case impossible to ignore, even for those who don’t watch the news. The White House said the FBI would be giving the investigation its “full resources”.
“So many people now seem to be engaged with this search that it is going to very hard for this individual to function. That sort of scrutiny makes it impossible for a suspect to move, and creates a sense of the world ‘closing in’ on them. That’s when they start to make mistakes,” Massey said.
Yellow ribbons now adorn the trees around Nancy Guthrie’s home, but as days pass with no word of her whereabouts the hope of an emotional homecoming is rapidly giving way to a deepening sense of dread.
By BBC News
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