Retired Sheriff's Lt. Shows How Tucson Washes Hide Evidence in Nancy Guthrie Search

TUCSON, Ariz. Walking a desert path through brush just a mile and a half from Nancy Guthrie's home in the Catalina Foothills, retired Pima County Sheriff's Lt. Bob Krygier points into the dense vegetation.

"You can throw something under the tree right there, in this brush right back here," he says. "We could walk past. I guarantee you we've walked by things that are probably suspicious in nature, dead animals, things like that, and you're just not going to see them. The terrain itself acts as a natural hide for things."

Krygier stands in a local wash, a dry waterway that carries runoff during heavy rain and known as an ephemeral river. These features cover Tucson and surrounding Pima County.

"Hundreds upon hundreds of these throughout the county and the city, if not thousands," he told Fox News Digital this week. "They're just literally everywhere. It's just the nature of the terrain, the way the geography was made."

The washes also serve as escape routes, he said. Krygier spent nearly three decades with the Pima County Sheriff's Department, the lead agency searching for the 84-year-old mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie. During that time, he chased countless suspects into washes, and authorities recovered remains of other missing persons there many times.

Some washes are narrow, others wide. One east of Guthrie's neighborhood stretches more than 150 yards across at points, wide enough for a vehicle.

"We're here within five minutes. And you saw, we could drive down this road for 10 seconds and be completely out of sight from any roadway," he said. "So then you now have what you need, which is time, and some cover from prying eyes."

In the same area, deputies found an abandoned vehicle on Feb. 2, parked near the wash entrance. A department spokesperson said it was not connected to the Guthrie case. Fox News Digital requested records on why it was there but has not received them.

A neighbor flagged the route to Fox News Digital after seeing a suspicious man walking there that day. She declined to give her name over safety concerns for her children amid the unsolved kidnapping probe.

Ring camera video from another resident in the neighborhood shows a vehicle driving away from Guthrie's home minutes after her suspected abduction. The resident gave the video to the FBI in February, with no updates since.

Power lines inside the wash lead toward nearby roads, offering guideposts for escape, Krygier said.

"I think they'd have to be very familiar with it because you're not gonna stumble upon this area from Nancy's house," Krygier said. "But it's close enough to where if you did some scouting days and weeks ahead of time, which there's some evidence that says they might have been out here prior to that night, this would be an area that I would look at and say, 'All right, let's figure this out. I can get here to there without being seen.'"

Guthrie is believed to have been taken from her home around 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 1. Her family found her missing around noon. Foot, plane and helicopter searches turned up nothing.

"Even with airplanes, even with the FLIR that we have, the infrared, you're looking down, you can't see through a lot of different things, so it's not going to see something that might have been stashed underneath some of this brush," Krygier said.

The federal government supplied equipment to detect the Bluetooth signal from Guthrie's pacemaker, but it yielded no results.

"At this point, I can't imagine saying no to anyone offering help, whether it be cadaver dogs, the Cajun Navy has popped up again," Krygier told Fox News Digital. "Those are just extra feet on the ground that I don't have to pay, quite honestly. Maybe if they find something, awesome. We probably wouldn't have found it. If they don't, great. I personally would be accepting some of that help. There's no reason not to at this point."

A reward topping $1.2 million stands for information solving the case. To stay anonymous, call Tucson's 88-Crime tip line at (520) 882-7463 or 1-800-CALL-FBI.