As Nancy Guthrie has been missing for months, fears have been raised by some observers that the investigation into her disappearance has gone cold.
In line with this, NewsNation reporter Brian Entin posed a question to Aaron Benzick, a detective known as a cold-case specialist.
Before asking, the reporter shared his view, “I was really hesitant for a long time to call it a cold case just because of all the work going on behind the scenes.”
Given the number of officers involved, Entin added, “And there’s still this dedicated task force made up of sheriff’s detectives and also FBI agents that this is the only case they work on every day.”
Still, the reporter said, “But as more time goes on, it is starting to feel cold, at least based on the information that I have.”
Overall, with this background in mind, Entin asked, “At what point do you technically classify something a ‘cold case’?”
To this, Benzick divided his response into two distinctions.
Initially, he weighed in on the public view of the case, saying, “Obviously, from the public’s perception, when things are quiet from the agency — we’ve got almost a year gone by, we haven’t found Nancy — it’s going to feel like things are cold or stale.”
Then, Benzick added, “But from an investigative point of view, we’re not at the cold case stage.”
Beyond the perception, the cold-case expert outlined the approaches he believed authorities should take to find leads and clues in the case.
Starting with the timeline, he urged the authorities to go back and reconstruct it.
“I would want to see what the actual facts are that I have in the case—the verifiable, hard facts—what are some things that we’ve assumed, and what are some things that are just open-ended? And are they being accounted for?”
Then, reorganise the tips and re-examine the hard proofs the authorities already had.
“If you go to many an investigative room in agencies across the nation, all of these large amounts of data, law enforcement is not equipped right away for this amount of large amounts of data.”
Meanwhile, Nancy has been missing since Feb. 1 from her home near Tucson, Arizona.
