When four University of Idaho students were gruesomely killed in 2022, James Fry, then the chief of the Police Department in Moscow, Idaho, knew it was the kind of case that, if he didn’t handle it well, could cost him his job.
In less than a week, the police parking lot filled up with news trucks, journalists inundated his office with interview requests and the public overwhelmed his officers with tips. “It was almost like everybody landed in Moscow at once,” he recalled in a recent interview.
As the national spotlight grew brighter, questions began to circulate about whether Mr. Fry and his team were up to the task of completing the investigation.
“It’s probably something that no one ever expects to happen in their career,” he said. “When there’s that big of a national press influence on a case, it puts a lot of pressure on a police department.”
Like many across the country, Mr. Fry has been closely following the case of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie who was went missing more than two weeks ago from her home in the Catalina Foothills just north of Tucson, Ariz. The case has captivated the nation and confounded the authorities, who have yet to give much insight into a possible motive, though the evidence points to a violent abduction.
The crime has put the spotlight on another local official: Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, whose leads a department of about 600 sworn officers.
Much like Mr. Fry in Idaho, Mr. Nanos has become the face of the investigation in Arizona and is under tremendous amount of pressure to find Ms. Guthrie. “This is really, for me, pretty new, all the media attention,” he said to a group of reporters early on.
Mr. Nanos is leading an investigation full of drama and suspense, with all the elements of a true-crime show, including ransom notes, tearful pleas from the family, false leads and small breaks in the case.
Last week, the authorities released haunting images of a masked man at Ms. Guthrie’s doorstep. Then a person of interest was brought in for questioning but promptly let go. Over the weekend, officials found gloves about two miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home that resembled those worn by the man in the video, and sent it to a lab for DNA testing.
Experts have offered a host of reasons the case has generated broad intrigue. Violence has long been at the center of the nation’s consciousness, and some crimes contain the right mix of celebrity, horror and mystery to inflame the public’s imagination — the Lindbergh kidnapping, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Menendez brothers.
But Ms. Guthrie’s case is also fundamentally rare, an abduction in the middle of the night, possibly by a stranger, said Charles Katz, the director of the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University. Abductions more commonly occur in domestic disputes over child custody, he said.
So much national attention can encourage the public to participate and provide tips, which happened last year as officials sought the Brown University school shooter. A tip by a bystander helped the authorities identify the vehicle that the assailant used, leading them to his whereabouts. He was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in New Hampshire.
Solving a case can be a boon for an officer’s career, bringing honors and promotions.
But the mounting pressure can also lead to hasty police work and the arrest of the wrong person, according to Robert Mathew Entman, a retired media and public affairs professor at George Washington University.
There have been some cases “where media pressure seems to have led to identifying the wrong perpetrator. You can go back to Emmett Till,” he said, referring to the 14-year-old boy savagely killed in Mississippi.
In the Idaho murders, four students were stabbed to death in a sleepy college town, some beyond recognition. The media juggernaut arrived in Moscow, a town of 26,000 people, demanding answers. But with few leads, Mr. Fry waited more than three days to have his first news conference.
“I have said many times that it was a failure on my part,” Mr. Fry said. “I should have came out within six to eight hours of us knowing what we had and at least given the community and individuals information on what we were dealing with.”
In the early days of the investigation, the Idaho State Police and the F.B.I. offered resources to address the public’s demands for information. Public information officers fielded tips and coordinated with the media, helping to streamline the law enforcement message.
“If we wouldn’t have done that, honestly, I think our case would have suffered greatly,” Mr. Fry said.
Mr. Fry sees some similarities between the Idaho killings and Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance. The two big breaks in the Idaho case came from video footage of a car in the area at the time of the killings and DNA found on a knife sheaf. Those leads led to the arrest of Bryan Kohberger, a Ph.D. student. It took investigators seven weeks to track him down. He pleaded guilty in 2025 to avoid a capital trial.
Investigators in Arizona have secured video footage and are analyzing DNA. Mr. Fry is hopeful they will be able to finish the job.
The former police chief recognizes the toll that these big cases have on officers. He did not have a complete night of sleep until the plea deal, almost two and a half years after the killings.
“I had never had anxiety before all this,” he said. But, he added, “everything that law enforcement officers go through is worth it in the end.”
Bernard Mokam covers breaking news.
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