The Reporter Who Won’t Give Up On the Nancy Guthrie Kidnapping Story
Brian Entin will pack more shirts next time.
It is a bit morbid to say the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping investigation, which hits the six-month mark(!) on Saturday, has made the NewsNation senior national correspondent a star — but such is the genre Entin traffics in. Also, it’s true. Amid a flurry of in-and-out mainstream media and social media coverage, Entin’s good, old-fashioned (and consistent) shoe leather reporting has stood tall above the conspiracy theories so often amplified by amateur internet sleuths. This was not Entin’s first rodeo; in some ways, the 41-year-old (don’t let the silver hair fool you) has been preparing for it his whole life.
The son of a criminal defense attorney, Entin first rose to national prominence with the Gabby Petito case. His profile grew with the Idaho college murders. Entin’s strategy? Get to the scene and “camp out on the lawn” until someone throws you off. Entin was the right guy with the right job when news of Nancy’s abduction was first reported.
“I remember talking to colleagues and saying, like, ‘There’s something really strange about this,’” Entin told The Hollywood Reporter.
Entin is from Florida, so “Silver Alerts” are nothing new in his world. But this very quickly, very clearly, was not that.
“You’re so used to hearing about them,” he continued. “Someone with Alzheimer’s walks off or something. So that was my first reaction. But within a couple of hours, I remember [Pima County sheriff Chris Nanos spoke], and there was just something off about it. We flew [to Arizona] that day.”
Entin, his cameraman Maurice “Mo” Moran, and a field producer “basically have not left since,” he says. (Entin did take a break to bring his mom on an Alaskan cruise for her 70th birthday, where he says “all the older ladies” wanted to chat with him about the Guthrie case.)
“I kind of just latch onto these things, and when everybody else leaves, we’re always like the last ones,” Entin says.
Entin only packed “three or four” shirts for his initial stay — so it has been a lot of long desert days and laundry. He’s as shocked as you that the investigation has been ongoing for this long with not a single suspect named.
“When the [Nest] camera video came out — oh my God! I thought that was it. It was so clear. You could see his eyes. You could see the clothing so well. You could see his gait. There were all sorts of details about the clothing, of the backpack,” Entin said. “I remember I thought immediately, ‘OK, this is it. In the next 48 hours, everybody get ready, we’re gonna be rushing out the door to some kind of arrest or some kind of bust.’”
That was just nine days after Nancy’s disappearance. There have been almost no leads since.
Part of Entin’s work has seen him interviewing “every retired FBI profiler [he] can think of.” Those conversations have informed Entin’s personal present-day theory.
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“I think it’s possible that it’s not about money. That that was like a distraction,” he said. “It’s possible it’s a Savannah stalker-type — someone who wanted to get to Savannah Guthrie in an emotional way.”
Tragically, mission accomplished. Savannah Guthrie returned to the Today show in March, but she has not stopped putting out the occasional, law-enforcement-assisted calls for help. It is clear that everyone believes Nancy, who was 84 years old at the time of her abduction and in poor health, is dead. But the job — not Entin’s, not Nanos’, not FBI director Kash Patel’s — is not done.
Entin’s not going anywhere. Entin, his camera operator, and a field producer are hunkered down in a hotel near Nancy’s Tucson home. Really, they’re mostly hunkered in a shared rental car “just staking places out.” (The investigation has taken them are far as Mexico, but right now Entin is splitting time between Tucson and working a separate story in Phoenix.)
The NewsNation crew gets a chance to stretch their legs in a driveway of a Guthrie neighbor whom they’ve befriended — a new ordinance has banned parking on Guthrie’s street — and 30 minutes away at the sheriff’s office. (Entin has been working on getting a new one-on-one interview with Nanos, though the last one was not especially friendly.)
Though one can still walk down Nancy’s street and film (for a bit) in front of her home, that is about the extent of the accessibility. It was the YouTubers who blew it for everyone else.
“They would stream live and stay there constantly — like, literally almost around the clock,” Entin said. “That was just becoming annoying to the neighbors.”
You know what’s even worse than being a pest? Putting non-suspects, like Nancy’s son-in-law Tommaso Cioni, out there as the possible kidnapper, which some people did. (One of them was Ashleigh Banfield, an occasional NewsNation contributor who used to host 10 p.m. To be fair to her, Banfield at least couched all of her reporting on sources, albeit anonymous. There are far-less-responsible amateurs putting information out via social media.)
“It sounds crazy to even have this conversation because, for you and I, it’s like kind of just what we do. But in today’s world, it’s kind of a commodity, but verifying everything that we report… having multiple sources — having good, solid, strong sources,” Entin said. “If you ever do get something wrong, which luckily I haven’t in a while, but it happens, make sure you correct it right away and explain to people what happened and why you made the mistake. So yeah, we try to do that all the time.”
Though the first six months hasn’t gone great, Entin believes the cops and the feds will solve this thing within the next six.
“Any day now something could happen,” he said. “All it takes, and it sounds cheesy, and you always hear this, but all it takes is like that one person to call in something, or them to get some kind of DNA match, which they’re still working on behind the scenes. So I do— I think before the one-year mark, there’ll be some kind of significant progress. That’s just what my gut says.”
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