Episode Details

For seventeen days, the Guthrie family has lived inside a psychological nightmare with no exit. Their mother — 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie — was taken from her Tucson home in the middle of the night. They don't know if she's alive. They don't know who took her. And while they've been navigating that impossible uncertainty, strangers on the internet have been dissecting their grief, analyzing their body language, and publicly accusing them of involvement in their own mother's disappearance.

Annie Guthrie and her husband Tommaso Cioni dropped Nancy off at 9:50 p.m. on January 31st. Hours later, she was gone. That single fact — being the last to see her — turned them into targets of online suspicion before investigators had named a single person of interest. It took seventeen days for Sheriff Chris Nanos to publicly state what the family already knew: they are victims, not suspects.

In this episode of Hidden Killers Live, psychotherapist Shavaun Scott examines the layered psychological trauma the Guthrie family is enduring. Scott has spent thirty years working with trauma survivors and victims of violence, and she explains what ambiguous loss — the experience of losing someone without knowing their fate — does to the human mind over the course of weeks. She addresses the specific cruelty of being publicly suspected while privately grieving, the psychological cost of watching the investigation fumble in real time with no power to intervene, and whether public exoneration can actually repair the damage that public accusation inflicts on a person's sense of self.

She also explores what happens psychologically to someone like Savannah Guthrie — whose professional identity is built on composure and control — when both are stripped away simultaneously, in front of millions of people. And she confronts the hardest question of all: whether the family can emerge from this kind of sustained psychological siege without permanent damage, regardless of how the case ends.

This is not speculation about the case. This is a clinical examination of what the case is doing to the people at its center.

#NancyGuthrie #SavannahGuthrie #GuthrieFamily #AmbiguousLoss #FamilyTrauma #PublicSuspicion #ShavaunScott #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime #GriefUnderScrutiny

Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/

Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspod

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/
Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod
X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod

Listen Ad-Free On Apple Podcasts Here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-today-premium-plus-ad-free-advance-episode/id1705422872

This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.