Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is facing even more backlash for taking care of himself instead of locating the missing mother of the ‘Today’ show co-host, Savannah Guthrie. The New York Post reported he has been seen more times at the gym than at his desk, searching through evidence of who might have kidnapped 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie.
Sheriff Faces Backlash
Chris Nanos is in charge of leading the search for Nancy, who has been missing for almost two months, and it seems that there has been no evidence to lead authorities closer to her whereabouts or the culprit responsible. The Post reported Nanos had been seen twice at the office the past week for only seven hours each day.
The 70-year-old Sheriff started the investigation as an empath, working tirelessly to find Nancy Guthrie, but as days continued with no sign of her, hope and faith in the Pima County Sheriff had dwindled. While hitting the gym four times in five days is not something to rage about, and is completely normal, the public is growing concerned that he is not doing everything in his power to lead the investigation.
He has reportedly been seen leaving his $850,000 manse in a gated community in a new Corvette Stingray to visit the gym for approximately 90 minutes each day. This newfound backlash comes a week after Nanos’ credentials were brought into light, showing he lied on his resume, making people question his capability of working alongside the FBI and leading his deputies to the suspect they have yet to identify.
Hope is Dwindling
As the case gets colder, the further we get away from January 31, 2026, the last day Nancy Guthrie was seen alive, Nanos will continue to face backlash, and the Guthrie family may never know what happened to their loved one.
However, Savannah Guthrie has made several pleas online to the kidnapper, going as far as offering $1 million for her return, but there have been no bites. Either the suspect does not have social media or watches the news, or this is a personal attack. Although the family was supposedly clear of any wrongdoing, the questions still hang in the air that maybe someone known to Nancy Guthrie concocted this entire scheme.
Regardless, Nanos is no closer to finding the missing woman, but has reassured her family that “investigators are definitely closer” to uncovering who dragged Nancy out of her home in the dead of night on February 1.
Press Interviews
Another public concern of Nanos is how he is portraying the case to the media. He has been giving several interviews over the course of this investigation, starting immediately after the day they began the search.
“The sheriff chooses to deal with the media in a bit of a haphazard way,” Betsy Brantner Smith from the National Police Association told The Post. “Normally, in a case like this, you would see regular press conferences, and it would be the sheriff or his designated person, and then somebody designated from the FBI — usually a public information officer or something like that.”
“The sheriff speaks to whoever he wants to speak to at that moment, which is just not the way that law enforcement should be doing things,” she concluded after Nanos revealed last week that they know the motive behind the kidnapping.
But they do not know, and they have no evidence to prove that they do. “We believe we know why he did this, and we believe that it was targeted, but we, we can’t, we’re not 100% sure of that,” Nanos falsely told NBC News.
