Nancy Guthrie and the true crime influencers

We have reached a new frontier in true-crime obsession. Nearly a month ago, an 84-year-old woman was allegedly kidnapped from her home. The mother of an NBC news anchor, Nancy Guthrie’s case received significant press attention. She still has not been found. But something odd has happened: across America, people are spending hours a day watching live streams of her home.

Allie Barto, a 49-year-old photographer in Philadelphia, is constantly tuned in, watching live streams filmed by influencers camped outside the crime scene. “If I’m at home, I’m just always listening to it in the background,” she told me. “Or if I’m at work, I pop it on to check in.”

Even as the Pima County Sheriff’s Department has begun scaling back detectives assigned to the case, online interest has hardly waned. Barto is part of a constellation of true-crime fanatics – mostly women – who tune in daily to watch Guthrie’s home, and she said round-the-clock stakeouts have become standard for the true-crime world. “It’s bizarre to watch,” she said. “Like last Friday, the pool cleaners came, and then this Friday, the pool cleaners came. Her pool cleaners. Life goes on. In real time, you can see how slow real life is.”

Beyond the voyeuristic thrill of watching the mundanity of someone else’s life, there is a darker wish fulfillment in this new form of true crime. What would the world look like if your worst nightmare occurred? The live streams offer a type of answer: life goes on.

On Barto’s TikTok account, she recounts details from the live streams and other online reporting (“I get a lot from X”), forming theories about Guthrie’s possible abduction. She’s been fascinated by crime since she was a teenager. “Women are the real crime followers,” she said. “You run into a lot of women [in the community], but the YouTubers and live streamers are male-dominated.”

The Nancy Guthrie case has demonstrated how the parasocial effect of fame can turn sour. Since Guthrie was suspected kidnapped, the investigation has yielded little concrete information but has become a mass visual spectacle, with Savannah Guthrie sharing video pleas to her millions of followers for information about her mother. Police disseminated Ring doorbell footage of a masked intruder outside Guthrie’s home the night she went missing. Several purported ransom notes were sent to media outlets including TMZ, some reportedly asking for cryptocurrency in exchange for information, though their authenticity remains unclear.

Savannah Guthrie said her family was offering a $1m reward for information leading to her mother’s return on Instagram. The FBI told reporters they have received 23,000 tips since the start of the investigation – largely due to the public popularity of the case – but no further information has been announced.

A 2010 academic study surveyed more than 35,000 people to investigate what researchers called a “paradox”: why women seemed captivated by stories of violence. They concluded these stories were educational for women – teaching them “important skills” that would prevent them from becoming the “unwilling star” of a true crime case one day. Podcast charts and YouTube analytics suggest this pattern still holds and women remain true crime’s largest audience.

Barto believes the draw is pragmatic. “As women, we need to be concerned with crime,” she told me. “We need to look out for red flags in our partners, who are most often the perpetrators of this stuff.”

Nick Snipe, a 29-year-old true crime TikTok influencer from East Tennessee, estimates the majority of his followers (“maybe 65–70%”) are women. Snipe began influencing when both he and his wife were truck drivers. Now true crime sleuthing is his main income. The Guthrie case has been popular for him, but his big break was the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner. “TMZ invited me on to speak on Nick Reiner, and you know, what do I know? But it was really cool,” he said. Nick Reiner, their son, has pleaded not guilty to the killings.

But some Guthrie sleuthers “certainly cross boundaries… They don’t understand how to have respect for these families. My ultimate goal is to help find missing people.” The big bucks, Snipe said, are on YouTube, where livestreamers often tip over the line between curiosity and exploitation.

The most popular YouTuber camping outside Guthrie’s home is JLR Investigates, whose real name is Jonathan Lee Riches. He has been in prison for wire fraud and once pretended to be the uncle of a young victim of the Sandy Hook shooting. But he found his comeback in true crime. He streams daily for up to 12 hours to his subscribers, suggesting shifting theories for Guthrie’s disappearance, and was recently scolded by local authorities for ordering takeaway food to the crime scene.

I tuned into one of his day-long livestreams on 26 February, which began with Riches greeting his followers as they all bidded each other “good morning!” in the comments. If a commenter sends money, they can ask Riches to do something for them. “Is the doormat still there?” asked a woman who had donated $5. Riches replied, walking closer to the house and zooming in on the doormat, “yep, have a look, they haven’t ever taken it away for testing!”

When he complained about the locals stopping him from parking, one commenter was outraged: “If people in that road complained to the sheriff about the press, they sure are some very SELFISH, self-centered people.”

One man, Dominic Evans, recently spoke to a reporter in tears, saying that Guthrie sleuthers had made his life hell after he briefly became their prime suspect. But commenters have already moved onto their next suspect: the Guthries themselves.

At the end of the 12-hour day, they were discussing their plans to return tomorrow, telling him – maternally – to drink water and get some sleep. Riches didn’t listen and returned during the night after hearing a drunk driver had been arrested nearby. The comments filled with gratitude for his work. By bearing witness, Riches and his viewers feel they are fulfilling a moral duty. They are watching so that Nancy Guthrie is not forgotten.

When the essayist Kate Tuttle reflected on her own true crime obsession, she compared it to listening to scary stories at summer camp with other girls: “Life, we were learning, is dangerous, but here we were, together.” The technological era has brought that feeling everywhere. Barto told me that the live streamers’ work is “very necessary”. But what feels most necessary is the gathering and mutual acknowledgement of the horror that has occurred. By investigating Guthrie’s disappearance, and keeping watch on her home, they’ve formed a space where their fear feels shared, still frightening, but stored safely behind the screen.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images