NOGALES, Mexico — Lidia Hernandez has been searching for her son, lost to drug violence in Mexico, for seven years. But she spent this week scouring rocky dirt for clues in the disappearance of a far more well-known crime victim — Nancy Guthrie.
On Sunday, Hernandez posted fliers on the mailbox at Guthrie’s home in the Catalina Foothills north of Tucson. On Wednesday, she led a group of other “Searching Mothers” in prayer across the border in Mexico as they tried to find out whether Guthrie had been taken there. On Thursday, she returned to Guthrie’s neighborhood once again.
Hernandez said her group, the Searching Mothers of Sonora, feels authorities aren’t doing enough to find Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie who was reported missing on Feb. 1.
It’s a common refrain for the mothers, who have used pickaxes and shovels to locate hundreds of bodies of victims of drug and gang violence in Mexico themselves over the years, decrying government inaction all the while.
“They’re not looking for her!” Hernandez, 66, a retired food service worker from Nogales, Arizona, said. “So we have to step in.”
As the investigation entered its fourth week, unauthorized search parties have exacerbated the chaos surrounding the high-profile case, which has gripped the nation and attracted media, true-crime streamers and curiosity seekers to the area around Guthrie’s spacious home.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has tried to calm the situation, asking in a statement Saturday that volunteer searchers back off and let the investigators do their jobs. On Thursday they instituted new parking restrictions around the house.
“We appreciate their concern, and we all want to find Nancy, but this work is best left to professionals,” the sheriff’s office said on a post on X.
Despite the sheriff’s office admonitions, the informal search parties have continued, including members of the United Cajun Navy — a volunteer group that normally responds to hurricanes — arriving in town midweek with sniffer dogs and drones. The sheriff’s office referred additional questions about the new searchers back to its Saturday post.
This week, the pace of the investigation appeared to slow, as investigators await the results of a complicated DNA test that could take weeks, authorities have said. Separately, ABC News reported that the FBI was downscaling its operations in Tucson and moving agents back to Phoenix. But thousands of citizens continue to call in tips to the FBI — more than 23,000 so far, authorities said. The Guthrie family this week offered a $1 million private award for information about their mother’s whereabouts.
“We still believe in a miracle,” Savannah Guthrie said in an Instagram video.
Amateur sleuths — especially those analyzing clues in web forums — have proliferated in recent years and sometimes do more harm than good, experts say. In the Guthrie case, for example, some have continued to speculate online that the Guthrie family could be involved, despite the fact that Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos cleared them as suspects.
Tricia Arrington Griffith, who manages the web forum for true-crime buffs called Websleuths, attributes the intense interest in the case to Savannah Guthrie’s fame and the possibility that her mother could still be alive.
“Time of the essence,” she said. “You tell people somebody out there is in trouble and with a bad guy and might die? People will move heaven and earth to try and and help.”
On Wednesday, Hernandez and the Searching Mothers traveled on a dirt road, deep with ruts about an hour south of Guthrie’s home, to a remote area with cacti and mesquite trees near the U.S.-Mexico border. The border wall, a rust-colored ribbon, unspooled in the northern distance over the dun-colored landscape.
Hernandez led the group in prayer before they hoisted shovels and metal rods and began combing the earth, looking for disturbed ground, which might indicate a burial. If they saw a telltale disturbance, they began immediately driving metal rods deep into the ground and pulling them back, sniffing the ends for the smell of a decomposing corpse.
For Hernandez, the grim work has been a boon, a constructive activity she has embraced in the pain and uncertainty she has lived with since her son, Jorge, 28, disappeared in Nogales on Nov. 4, 2019. Like the other mothers, she wears a white T-shirt with a purple logo and photo of her son above the word “DISAPPEARED.”
When Nancy Guthrie vanished, she felt an immediate affinity for the Guthrie family, she said.
“It was pain, and sadness, the same feeling that the mothers go through — every day, every week, every year,” she said. “The pain is permanent.”
The Searching Mothers had received an anonymous tip, the group’s leader, Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta, said, pointing them to this area — a swath of forested land crisscrossed with narrow pathways used by migrants and drug traffickers.
“They told us, ‘If they wanted to take her across to Mexico, this would have been the best way to take her,’” she said.
She brushed off criticism from authorities that the volunteer searchers are at risk of hampering the investigation.
“The [police] are not searching underground — they’re doing investigations, they’re waiting for someone to hand her over alive, or she’s in a place where they where they won’t be able to find her,” Flores said. “If we managed to find her, with our technology — which is only a shovel and a bar — I think they’d end up embarrassed.”
She continued: “They say we’re violating the investigation, but what investigation? They’ve had a month and they haven’t been able to resolve the case. And so they must let the mothers participate.”
Investigators for Mexico’s lead criminal agency do not believe Guthrie has been taken across the border, according to Agent Alberto Osona Guerrero, who was at the scene of mothers’ search Wednesday.
“The truth is, it’s very difficult to transport a person against their will and cross them into Mexico,” Osona Guerrero said. The mothers might find a body, he said, but likely not the one they’re looking for.
Flores founded the group in 2019 to search for the tens of thousands of missing — more than 130,000 according to the government’s last count — victims of drug cartels and gang violence who are left in shallow graves or burned. She has two sons who have been kidnapped, and despite her public pressure, authorities have given her no indication of their whereabouts.
The mothers don’t try to find the perpetrators of crimes, instead focusing on reuniting families or providing closure when they find remains, which they call “treasures.” They’ve had some success. Volunteer mother groups in Flores’s home state of Sonora have found five missing people just this year, according to the state’s commission on missing people.
In 2024, Flores and other mothers searching outside Mexico City found a clandestine dumping ground filled with human remains, and was criticized by a local prosecutor for disturbing evidence, according to an Associated Press account of the discovery. Her response? Do your job.
On Wednesday near the border, Flores and other volunteers found a spent shell casing on the ground. Flores directed them where to dig.
“Here, this is where they would have fallen,” she said, as the volunteers began swinging pickaxes, the sound of metal hitting rock resonating through the small grove of trees. But after digging for an hour, they found nothing.
Other searchers, including Yolanda Veronica Paredes, a local resident who also lost her son in a kidnapping, followed a stream bed deep into the hills, toting their shovels. They passed a small lake, the bleached ribs of a dead cow, a shrine to the Virgin Mary and the detritus of wanderers along the narrow path — a sock, an empty Pall Mall package, a discarded bottle of orange soda.
They reached a trash pile in the woods and began to dig. Soon, Paredes pulled up a clump of earth and sniffed deeply.
“I smell something dead!” she said. She and the other searchers began digging and pulled up more trash, including a fraying windbreaker. But eventually they reached a point that required stronger tools than what they had brought with them. They conferred and decided to return the following day — with a pickax.
As the search wrapped up for the day, Fernandez said she would continue looking for Guthrie as long as her disappearance remains unsolved. But she said her hope in finding her alive was waning and believed her spirit had left the earth.
“She is not there,” Fernandez said sadly.
Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report from Washington.
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