Legal scholars sometimes bemoan what they call the “CSI effect”—the tendency, in courtrooms, for jurors’ familiarity with true-crime TV shows to skew their expectations of how crimes are investigated and solved. The effect emerges from a paradox: People’s interest in televised versions of the criminal-justice system can, regardless of their compassion or sympathies, impede justice in the real world.
The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, an unsolved mystery playing out in real time, embodies a similar paradox. The 84-year-old—the mother of the Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie—has been missing since February 1, when her failure to attend church services triggered a wide-ranging and, as the days have worn on, ever more desperate search. What seems clear at this point, and what law-enforcement officers say they have determined, is that Nancy was taken from her home near Tucson, Arizona, against her will. Today, investigators released a video recovered from her entryway camera, showing a person—masked, gloved, carrying what appears to be a holstered gun—at her door during the hours of the assumed abduction. The video may be a break in a case that has captivated national attention both despite and because of all the questions it has left unanswered. Among them: Where is Nancy Guthrie? What condition is she in? Is her disappearance connected to the fact that her daughter is a celebrity?
The open questions, and the narrative that has risen around them, have turned Nancy herself into something of a celebrity. Her fate has become a matter of feverish national interest, and her abduction a shock that, as it enters its second week, has remained front-page, broadcast-leading news. Its smallest details have been shared on purpose-built live blogs, rehashed through ad hoc podcasts, discussed endlessly on social media—as melodramas, as cliffhangers, as plot twists. This is the CSI effect at its broadest and most reductive. Nancy’s disappearance, as a human circumstance—a grandmother taken from her house in the middle of the night, held by someone unknown—is unthinkable. As a story, though, the case’s dynamics are all too familiar. Public interest changes the terms of any tragedy. The longer that this one has gone on, the more that its horrors have hewed to the demands of the show.
This is, to a degree, because of the particulars of the case. Nancy’s disappearance, in addition to playing out as television, has also played out through television. People claiming to be her kidnappers have allegedly communicated with the Guthrie family through notes sent to TV stations. (The gossip site TMZ also said that it had received a note, making it something of a character in the unfolding drama.) And the family has responded, addressing the presumed kidnappers through, at least in part, their own small productions—videos that Savannah and her two siblings have posted publicly, pleading for their mother’s safe return. The messages embody the same split-screen reality as many other elements of the case: Their ostensible aim is to bring things to a conclusion, but each new post—see, for example, the one that Savannah, this time solo, posted yesterday—also adds to the spectacle, providing fodder for viewers and narrative momentum.
Attention can be a blessing and a curse. Statements posted by Savannah explicitly ask for the public’s help in locating Nancy. (NBC, which broadcasts Today, has shared with its audience the FBI’s tip line and the phone number of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.) And public interest in private tragedies can sometimes lead to clues and insights that might otherwise have eluded law-enforcement officials working alone. The murder of the vlogger Gabby Petito, for example, was solved with the help of social-media users who, following the case from afar, found the crucial clues.
But public interest has also, arguably, made the Guthrie case more difficult to parse than it might otherwise have been. Officials have received multiple letters claiming to be ransom notes—and seem to have spent much of their time attempting to discern which, if any, might be authentic, and which might be the work of hoaxers. (Last week, federal authorities arrested a man who they allege contacted members of the Guthrie family via text message with what seems like a ransom demand. According to the complaint against him, the man, after being read his Miranda rights, admitted to having sent two messages.)
Whatever its direct costs and benefits to an investigation, public interest also comes with broader complications. The Guthrie case, like so many before it, has attracted its own coterie of self-professed “experts”—people who assess the situation from a distance, analyzing the meager evidence available to them and speculating about the victim’s fate. Some seem well intentioned in their interest; having learned of the case, they are following it—participating in it—in the hope that it might have a happy ending. Others seem more craven; understanding that tragedies are also trending topics, they have found new ways to transform public concern into personal clout.
Some commenters, meanwhile, live out the full paradox of the made-for-TV saga: Their sympathy, soon enough, gives way to the needs of the show. Reddit boards hosting discussions of the case offer grim evidence of the concession. Many people come to the story—the missing woman, the panicked family, the ordeal so singular but relatable—expressing compassion. But compassion, once expressed, has nowhere else to go. Instead, some posters might offer theories about what happened, what didn’t, what evidence might have been withheld. A few might escalate into wild speculation: that the suspected abduction was an “inside job”; that it was committed by a drug cartel; or that it is related to the fact that Savannah Guthrie, in her work as an NBC journalist, has covered the Epstein files.
Versions of this escalation are familiar features of many sites—platforms that offer people incentives, social and financial and otherwise, to edge toward extremism. Reddit abhors a vacuum. And the conversations it hosts, on their own, do little to affect the case; they are, for the most part, idle chatter. But their trajectories—the ease with which they transform compassion into conspiracism—hint at an everyday tragedy lurking within an exceptional one: the fact that empathy and exploitation are never as distant as they might seem. Attention is currency, in some ways the truest and most valuable we have to give. When one family’s nightmare becomes nationally syndicated, though, attention can become a demand—for more detail, for more drama, for a cathartic conclusion. The vigil can come to look like voyeurism, the human care made crass. What is the difference between feeling someone’s pain and consuming it? From the distance of the screen, it can become all too hard to tell.
