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Eleven days after the mother of \u201cToday\u201d show host Savannah Guthrie<\/a> vanished from her home in the foothills outside Tucson, Arizona, investigators had yet to identify<\/a> a suspect or even a person of interest Wednesday.<\/p>\n What seemed like a major break Tuesday \u2014 when authorities detained a person<\/a> for questioning \u2014 fizzled when the man was released hours later. The detainment followed another potential break earlier in the day when investigators released video footage showing a masked and apparently armed man at Nancy Guthrie<\/a> \u2019s doorstep the night of her disappearance.<\/p>\n The overall lack of progress has generated pressure and questions for local and federal investigators who haven\u2019t held a news conference in days. From the outside, it might seem like solving the case and finding the 84-year-old Guthrie is growing unlikely, but investigators may be further along than they let on.<\/p>\n It’s not uncommon for cases to seem dead in the water at the outset and still eventually get solved, said Mary Ellen O\u2019Toole, a former FBI profiler who worked on the yearslong search for the \u201cUnabomber.\u201d <\/p>\n So how do investigators tackle cases like this?<\/p>\n Surveillance footage released Tuesday showed a person<\/a> on Guthrie’s porch wearing a ski mask, backpack and what looked like a holstered handgun. <\/p>\n It offered the best opportunity yet for the public to help identify the suspect, said O’Toole, thinking back to the hunt for Ted Kaczynski, known as the \u201cUnabomber,” who was caught in 1996 after a yearslong search.<\/p>\n Kaczynski, who carried out a 17-year bombing campaign<\/a> that killed three people and injured 23 others, wrote a manifesto that was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post before he was caught. <\/p>\n His brother recognized Kaczynski’s tone in the screed, tipped off the FBI, and Kaczynski was arrested in a cabin outside Lincoln, Montana.<\/p>\n Similarly, Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in New York, was arrested five days later when someone recognized him at a McDonalds and called in a tip.<\/p>\n In Guthrie’s case, the release of the surveillance footage and Savannah Guthrie’s plea for the public’s help is the same strategy, O’Toole said. <\/p>\n Someone who knows the suspect may have noticed them acting unusual, such as not going to work, following the news closely or making offhand comments about the case. <\/p>\n If they recognize anything familiar about the masked person on camera, that could confirm their suspicions and lead them to tip off investigators, O’Toole said. <\/p>\n Investigators said DNA from blood on Guthrie’s porch matched her, and O\u2019Toole said investigators will still be casing the area for DNA from a possible suspect, including hair or fingerprints, which have helped solve other cases.<\/p>\n Bryan Kohberger, the criminology student who sneaked into a home and stabbed four University of Idaho students to death in 2022, was arrested after trace DNA was found on a knife sheath left on one of the victim’s bed.<\/p>\n That DNA didn\u2019t yield any results from standard law enforcement databases, so investigators turned to publicly available genealogy services, searching for possible relatives.<\/p>\n After homing in on Kohberger by tracking his car using surveillance footage near the crime scene, investigators got a Q-tip from the trash<\/a> outside his family’s home and tested the DNA. <\/p>\n It matched the father of the person whose DNA was on the knife sheath.<\/p>\n In the days after a shooter killed two people at Brown University in 2025, investigators didn’t appear any closer to identifying the suspect. <\/p>\n