Surrender or Get Caught—The Legal Fork Facing Nancy Guthrie's Abductor
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whoever is responsible for Nancy Guthrie's disappearance is sitting on a decision that will shape the rest of their life.
The evidence released so far doesn't suggest a mastermind. It suggests someone who cased the house, came back, and got surprised by a doorbell camera they didn't know existed. Someone who improvised with plants from a pot to cover the lens. Someone who may not have intended for an 84-year-old woman to die—but is now three and a half weeks into hiding the result.
Eric Faddis was a felony prosecutor. Now he's a criminal defense attorney. He's seen what happens on both sides when cases like this finally land in a courtroom.
Arizona's felony murder statute doesn't require intent to kill. If Nancy Guthrie died during a burglary, that's a murder charge. Add body concealment, evidence tampering, and weeks of flight, and the legal exposure is already catastrophic.
But there's still a fork in the road.
Faddis explains what walking into a police station with a lawyer and the location of the body actually buys—versus getting caught cold through genetic genealogy or a tip. One scenario gives the defense leverage for negotiation. The other lets prosecutors paint a portrait of someone who hid, lied, and let a family suffer while they calculated their odds.
The hardest part: without the body, neither side can prove how Nancy died. The defense can't establish it was accidental. Prosecutors can't establish it wasn't. And the person who created that evidentiary black hole is the one who hid her.
Faddis gives the honest answer on what the range of outcomes looks like now—and how fast that range is narrowing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:03.2 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:07.1 | Four weeks into the Nancy Guthrie investigation and still no suspect, no person of interest, no body, but the evidence tells a story. |
| 0:16.1 | Was there prior visits to a home? |
| 0:18.0 | A suspect you didn't know about a doorbell camera until he was standing in |
| 0:21.6 | front of it, grabbing foliage, improvised attempts to cover the lens. This doesn't look like a |
| 0:27.7 | professional operation. It looks like someone who thought they knew what they were doing and didn't. |
| 0:32.8 | This was a burglary that went sideways and Nancy Guthrie died during a confrontation that a perpetrator |
| 0:38.5 | never intended to have happened. What does that person face legally right now if they come |
| 0:45.2 | forward, if they're ever caught? Former felony prosecutor and defense attorney Eric Fattis is with us |
| 0:50.9 | to break down what this all means. |
| 0:59.3 | Felony murder, concealment charges, a difference between surrendering and getting caught, |
| 1:06.2 | and whether there's any path forward for someone sitting with this or whether that window has already closed. |
| 1:08.2 | Eric, as always, thank you for being here. |
| 1:10.7 | Arizona has felony murder. |
| 1:16.0 | If someone breaks into a home and a death occurs during that burglary, even if the death wasn't intended, what goes through what that charge means and why intent to kill doesn't |
| 1:22.1 | always matter under that statute. |
| 1:25.2 | Yeah, that is sort of a creative law that originated decades ago, whereby, you know, if |
| 1:32.4 | there was a commission of a felony and someone died during the course thereof, the states |
| 1:37.9 | decided, hey, we want to punish that just like we would punish murder because there were |
| 1:41.5 | so many casualties that were happening during these high-level felonies. And so, yeah, for example, if someone is in the commission of a felony and they didn't even |
| 1:49.4 | intend to kill another person, but another person dies as a result of those criminal actions, |
... |
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