Why Nancy Guthrie Search Echoes 'Sinister' Idaho Murders 'TikTok Chaos'

Nancy Guthrie's abduction from her Tucson-area home in Arizona has drawn a troubling comparison to the 2022 Idaho student murders, with NewsNation reporter Brian Entin identifying a shared, sinister, and deeply corrosive pattern in both cases, where social media users appoint themselves as detectives and in doing so ruin the lives of people with no connection to either crime.

Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was last seen at her Catalina Foothills home on the evening of Jan. 31, 2026. She was reported missing the following morning after failing to attend church. DNA testing confirmed that blood found on her porch was hers, and signs of forced entry were discovered at the property.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos concluded early in the investigation that Nancy had been taken against her will. She requires daily medication that authorities have said could be life-threatening if unavailable. More than five weeks have now passed, and law enforcement has yet to publicly identify a single suspect.

Entin, who has covered the Nancy Guthrie case from the outset, examined the social media dimension in the March 7 episode of his YouTube series Brian Entin Investigates. His focus fell on a phenomenon that has played out almost identically in both the Guthrie and Idaho investigations, with online users creating 'TikTok Chaos,' armed with little more than paused doorbell footage and a confident following, publicly naming individuals they suspect of involvement without any investigative grounding.

How Dominic Evans Became a Target

The most recent casualty of this behaviour in the Guthrie investigation is Dominic Evans, a longtime friend and former bandmate of Nancy's son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni. Social media users circulated claims that Evans matched the physical description of a masked individual visible in doorbell camera footage captured at Nancy's home around the time of her disappearance. The online crowd pointed to what they described as a matching athletic build, similar facial hair including a moustache and goatee, and a wrist tattoo faintly visible in the footage.

What they failed to account for was the complete absence of any law enforcement interest in Evans whatsoever. Entin was unambiguous on this. 'There was never any evidence behind the scenes that they were going to raid Dominic's house, or that he's ever been connected to the crime,' he told his viewers. 'So it's just one example of this happening, where a couple of people online with big followings decide to call somebody out, even when there's no evidence of it, and it spirals out of control.'

The Idaho murders occurred in November 2022, when Bryan Kohberger broke into an off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho, and killed four University of Idaho students — Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle — while they slept. Kohberger pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary as part of an agreement to avoid the death penalty, and was subsequently sentenced to four consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. A motive has never been formally established.

The $10 Million Lesson the Idaho Murders Left Behind

The parallel Entin drew was stark. In the Idaho case, a TikTok user named Ashley Guillard, who described herself as a psychic and tarot card reader, repeatedly and publicly accused Rebecca Scofield, a history professor and department chair at the University of Idaho, of orchestrating the murders. Guillard's apparent reasoning rested on what her tarot cards allegedly revealed, supplemented by a fabricated narrative that Scofield had been romantically involved with one of the victims, and that a supposed falling out had left the professor vengeful enough to commit murder. None of it had any foundation in reality, and according to court records, Scofield had never even met the students.

What gave the case its particular weight was Guillard's refusal to stop. Even after Kohberger was arrested and charged, Guillard, by Entin's account, 'would not give up.' Scofield eventually pursued legal action, and the case travelled all the way to a federal courtroom in Boise. On Feb. 27, 2026, a seven-person jury deliberated for under two hours before awarding Scofield $10 million in damages — $6.5 million tied to the murder allegations, and $3.5 million for fabricated claims about an inappropriate student relationship. Scofield testified that the ordeal had left her with severe anxiety, PTSD and physical symptoms serious enough to threaten her capacity to continue as department chair.

'This professor fought back, and ended up taking this TikToker all the way to federal court,' Entin said. 'A jury ended up rewarding the professor a $10 million judgement that the TikToker now has to pay.'