The Arizona sheriff investigating the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie‘s mom, Nancy Guthrie, has a message for those who think that her family, including spouses of family members, is behind the elder Guthrie’s disappearance.
“To be clear…the Guthrie family – to include all siblings and spouses – has been cleared as possible suspects in this case,” the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement released Monday. “The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case.”
The statement continues. “To suggest otherwise is not only wrong, it is cruel. The Guthrie family are victims plain and simple … please, I’m begging you the media to honor your profession and report with some sense of compassion and professionalism.”
The statement comes in the wake of Ashleigh Banfield reporting shortly after Nancy Guthrie was declared missing that her son-in-law Tommaso Cioni, one of the last people to see the elder Guthrie before she vanished, “may be” the “prime suspect” in the alleged kidnapping.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos previously spoke out against Banfield’s reporting, without mentioning her by name, in a press conference just days after explosive report, which was later picked up by TMZ and other outlets.
“Nobody’s eliminated, but we just really don’t have enough to say, ‘This is our suspect, this is our guy, we know — or our gal.’ We don’t know that,” Nanos said. “And it’s really kind of reckless to report that someone is a suspect when they could very well be a victim.”
He added, “To the media, I plead with you to be careful of what it is we put out there, because we don’t have anybody here listed as a suspect, and you could actually be doing some damage to the case — but you can do some damage to that individual too. Social media is kind of an ugly world sometimes.”
The day of the press conference, the producer of Banfield’s podcast, Drop Dead Serious, where she first made the claims about Cioni, told The Hollywood Reporter that Banfield “stands by her reporting” and “her ironclad source.”
Banfield has continued to defend her reporting, telling Dan Abrams on his SiriusXM program on Thursday, “I can tell you that my source every day since has stood by that reporting. And that is the thinking as of the day after Guthrie was reported missing.”
She added, “Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed. But I will say this: the day after I did that report, my source said, ‘things have really tightened up.’ … The folks in the Sheriff’s Department are worried about retaliation because of the leak. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, if it’s not true, there wouldn’t be any worry,’ you know?”
More to come.
