More than 170 days since Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, a former FBI agent believes the case has reached what he considers “cold case” status.
Retired FBI agent Steve Moore, who investigated numerous cold cases during his career, shared his assessment of the investigation in an interview with Brian Entin.
“The case is cold. The case is completely cold,” Moore said during the July 21 episode of “Brian Entin Investigates.”
Nancy Guthrie Update: Retired FBI Agent Explains How Cold Cases Are Handled
Moore emphasized that a cold case is not necessarily a closed case, adding that the FBI “doesn’t forget” such investigations.
“They don’t close those cases ever, but they’ll give them to new agents who are coming in with a new set of eyes who are not indoctrinated into the way the FBI necessarily investigates everything. And sometimes people see them in a different light,” Moore explained.
Moore also noted that the FBI is under an “immense” amount of pressure to solve the Nancy Guthrie case.
“This is not acceptable in the FBI,” Moore stressed. “We cannot have unsolved cases. We’re the FBI. So, there is probably a lot of push on this.”
Moore said the FBI is likely “evaluating not just the case, but how they work the case and trying to find what they can do to look at it from a different standpoint.”
He continued, “And so I don’t see right now that they are giving up on the case by any stretch of the mind, but I do believe if I were them, I’d be evaluating whether we had the right people on it.”
Retired FBI Agent Questions Detail of Nancy Guthrie Abduction Timeline
During the interview, Entin also brought up the timeline of Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance shared by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Moore pointed out something that he finds confusing.
The timeline states that Guthrie’s doorbell camera disconnected at 1:47 a.m. Yet at 2:12 a.m., the software detected a person on camera.
Moore questioned how the software could have detected someone roughly 25 minutes after the camera had reportedly disconnected.
“Those are contradictory statements,” Moore added. “So either they got her out in 16 minutes, or they got her out in 45 minutes. So that’s a big issue.”
In February, cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos explained to CBS News how doorbell cameras store data.
“Internal storage uses a very lazy deletion mechanism, so the data wouldn’t be available to users who didn’t pay,” Stamos told the outlet. “The video for non-subscribers would be marked for deletion, but depending on the exact implementation details, the actual files might not be deleted for days, and the actual data wouldn’t be overwritten until the storage was needed.”
Meanwhile, Patrick Jackson, a former NSA data researcher and chief technology officer at privacy and security company Disconnect, said most doorbell cameras feature a tamper mode that alerts users when a device is disconnected or damaged. He believes those alerts could also prompt companies to retain relevant data for longer than usual.
“From Google’s server perspective, it knows if that device goes offline,” Jackson said. “And so if the last event was tamper detected, and it’s a motion event, it could tag it in a way where Google may not delete that and may know that this could have some value to some law enforcement.”
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