Federal officials have likely been preparing since yesterday for an expected deluge of tips to come in following the release of video from Nancy Guthrie’s front door video camera, according to Andrew McCabe, a former FBI deputy director.
The FBI surged resources to the Tucson, Arizona, area yesterday, McCabe said. This puts people in place to follow up on information expected to come in from the public, he said.
The surveillance video shows a masked person tampering with the cameras outside of Guthrie’s home just before her disappearance.
“You’re going to have hopefully many, many people in this area who call in and say, ‘I think I saw something weird,’” McCabe said. “Every one of those people, you got to put two agents on their doorstep within a couple of hours and have those people interviewed to find out what they have to offer.”
There are also likely hundreds of analysts processing information and images that comes in online and on the phone about the case, McCabe said.
“All of that stuff has to be looked at and prioritized,” McCabe said. “There’s a massive backend of people that’s got to do a lot of work to convert these calls, these tips, these observations into hard leads.”
Most of the tips won’t lead to a breakthrough, he said, but to get to those few that could, “you might have to go through many thousands of others.”