On Mother’s Day, Savannah Guthrie posted an emotional message to her missing mother, Nancy, on Instagram: “We will never stop looking…. We will never be at peace until we find you.”

Inside the Search for Nancy Guthrie

Her kidnapping riveted the nation—as did the botched hunt for Guthrie’s abductor. Yet even as hopes dim, a resourceful task force soldiers on

By Howard Blum

Time sure as hell doesn’t heal all wounds. Not when an 84-year-old grandmother with a heart condition has been abducted. Not when there are droplets of dark red blood staining the stone slabs trailing away from the front door of her desert home. Not when the ransom notes have stopped coming. And not when “missing without a trace” is another word for “dead.”

This is the anxious situation that the Special Task Force, a combined F.B.I. and Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Department unit, investigating the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, is trying to come to terms with as the search drags on well past its 100th day. For it is an inquiry that, I have learned, at this point hangs by a thread. Without a sudden change of luck—a reward-claiming tip? a technician at the F.B.I. lab at Quantico finally zeroing in on an errant speck of DNA?—there will likely be no resolution. Pima County Sheriff’s Department Case #260201080 has become a waiting game.