Four months on from the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie from her home in Tucson, Arizona, former FBI agent Maureen O'Connell pointed to an unusual detail in the case that warranted further investigation.
Maureen spoke with NewsNation's Brian Entin about the case involving the 80-year-old mother of Today star Savannah Guthrie, and explained that Nancy's family did not have prior access to the security cameras around her home.
"The thing I found very, very interesting was that the family let the first responders know – this is based on the dispatch recordings – that they had no access or control over any of the cameras around that house," she said. According to reports, Nancy's security cameras were installed primarily for wildlife observation.
© Instagram"And I guess the general understanding is that Nancy only put the cameras up for wildlife purposes – which I understand. I mean, I think it's great in a situation like that. It's cool to watch the birds and everything like that," Maureen continued.
"I just found that strange," she said, before concluding that she would have wanted access to the camera footage "just in case" if it was her mother. Nancy's doorbell camera has provided one of the only pieces of solid evidence in the ongoing investigation, which began on February 1 after her family reported her missing.
Several days after Nancy disappeared, the FBI recovered footage from the doorbell camera that saw a masked man approach her front door in the night and attempt to dismantle the camera. The individual, who was wearing a balaclava, gloves and a gun in his holster, has yet to be identified.
© FBIFBI director Kash Patel explained how the team recovered the footage on Hang Out With Sean Hannity, after claiming that local authorities initially kept the bureau out of the investigation for four days.
See the chilling footage below...
"The first 48 hours of anyone's disappearance are the most critical," he said. "For four days, we were kept out of the investigation. And when we were finally let in…look what we did."
He continued: "We went in and got the Ring doorbell. And we said, 'Hey, is anyone talking to Google?' I called the leadership at Google…'Can we go in to the data before it's deleted and see what we can find?' That's why you have that image, because the FBI worked with Google to put that image out."
© Hang Out with Sean Hannity/YouTube"We could have gotten it days before," he added of the footage. "We could have also maybe gotten more data." It is unknown if the footage released by the FBI was recorded on February 1, when Nancy went missing.
© NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal viaThe grandmother had spent the previous night before her disappearance with her daughter, Annie Guthrie, and her son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, before being dropped home just before 10 p.m.
Nancy's doorbell camera was then disconnected at 1:47 a.m. the morning of February 1, and motion was detected but not recorded 25 minutes later. Her pacemaker disconnected from her phone around 2:28 a.m., and the alarm was raised by her family around midday.
