What To Know
- Prosecutor Tad DiBiase believes a homicide case could be successfully tried in Nancy Guthrie’s case, even without her body being found.
- DiBiase emphasizes the importance of continued searches for Guthrie’s remains.
- He also points out that this case is unusual for a no-body murder.
If Nancy Guthrie, the missing mother of Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was murdered, prosecutors could move forward with a homicide case even if her body is never found, according to one expert.
Speaking to journalist Brian Entin, prosecutor Tad DiBiase said he has spent the last 20 years educating police and fellow prosecutors on bringing “no-body” murder cases to trial, and he thinks the Nancy Guthrie case could be tried successfully without human remains.
“That said, it is always, always better to have a body, without a doubt, because … if you get remains, it tells you this person left these remains here. These remains are from this long ago. … How did she die? Did she die of natural causes because of her medical issues? And I don’t mean that she walked away and died; I mean, someone kidnapped her and then all of a sudden she passed away,” he told Entin. “So having the body gives you all of that critical, critical information. So even though my area of expertise is when you don’t have a body, I always counsel [investigators to] continue to look for the body.”
DiBiase also said he’s surprised investigators haven’t done more searches of the area around the house outside Tucson, Arizona, from which Nancy disappeared on February 1.
“When you go to trial, you want to be able to say to the jury, ‘Here’s all the searches we did, and we confirmed that there’s no way that she walked away on her own. There’s no way that she escaped. There’s no way that she [died by] suicide.’ Any of those things,” he said. “Because you don’t know that unless you’ve done a very thorough search and you were able to say to the jury, we can knock out these other possibilities of things happening.”
Additionally, DiBiase explained how this case “does not fit into what you typically see” in no-body murder cases. “Fifty-four percent are between people who know each other in a domestic relationship. And then you have a whole bunch of people who just knew each other — maybe they were friends, maybe they were roommates, maybe they were business associates, maybe they were fellow members of organized crime,” he said. “So you have these categories that these cases fit into. And a stranger-on-stranger no-body murder case with an adult victim is highly, highly unusual.”