{"id":187556,"date":"2026-02-21T13:43:18","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T13:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/187556\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T13:43:18","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T13:43:18","slug":"how-nancy-guthrie-and-other-notable-disappearances-unsettle-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/187556\/","title":{"rendered":"How Nancy Guthrie and other notable disappearances unsettle us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

People who know nada about aviation history still know who Amelia Earhart is.<\/p>\n

People who know squat about American labor unions still know who Jimmy Hoffa is.<\/p>\n

People know them \u2014 the pioneering flier and the Teamsters union president \u2014 because both of them vanished dramatically.<\/p>\n

\"Teamsters <\/p>\n

Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa visits Washington on July 26, 1959.<\/p>\n

(AP Photo\/File)<\/p>\n

Both were famous in life, and now enduringly so in the mystery of their disappearing.<\/p>\n

Death itself holds tragedy but rarely mystery. We can tell that some animating spirit has left a body; we can see the corporeal before and after.<\/p>\n

Yet with a disappearance, there is no \u201cafter,\u201d no finale. And that unsettles and engrosses us.<\/p>\n

Now we have the vanishing of Nancy Guthrie, the octogenarian mother of a TV news personality, evidently carried off from her Arizona home into \u2026 a void. No trace, no proof of life, and all the while, the nation is informed of every twist of what mostly is not happening.<\/p>\n

Get the latest from Patt Morrison <\/p>\n

Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.<\/p>\n

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a> and our Privacy Policy<\/a>. <\/p>\n

It turns out there are several kinds of \u201cdisappeared\u201d:<\/p>\n

There are people who choose to disappear. It\u2019s practically a founding American tradition. Our continental spread allowed people to \u201clight out for the territory,\u201d in Mark Twain\u2019s phrase, to shed one identity and assume another \u2014 a cowboy, maybe, or a con-man. <\/p>\n

The American West was a magician\u2019s box: go in as one person, emerge as another. This is much harder to do now that tech can foil any vanisher\u2019s plans, from renting cars to getting cash. And those who fake their own deaths usually get caught. More than 20 years back, a Newport Beach doctor dodging nearly $2.5 million in insurance fraud charges bought himself a fake Russian death certificate. He got nabbed after almost 14 years on the lam, some of them spent teaching scuba in Egypt.<\/p>\n

\"Patty <\/p>\n

Patty Hearst is escorted in handcuffs at the inmate entrance of the Criminal Court Building in Los Angeles in 1976.<\/p>\n

(John Malmin\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

The people who are stolen away, like Nancy Guthrie. Some are found soon, some much later, some living, and some not. The 1974 political kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was front-page news for a year and a half \u2014 her abduction, then her announcement that she was joining her captors, then her discovery, arrest, and prosecution.<\/p>\n

One of California\u2019s most heartbreaking stolen children was 12-year-old Polly Klaass, kidnapped in 1993 from a slumber party and murdered. Grieving volunteers and friends searched for two months before her body was found. Her parents became ardent advocates on behalf of missing children. And in 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard was dragged into a car in a small Sierras town by a husband-and-wife pair of rapist-kidnappers, and disappeared \u2014 for 18 years. In 2009, a pair of UC Berkeley police noticed something was \u201coff\u201d about a man on campus with two little girls \u2014 girls he had fathered during his rapes of Dugard, as it turned out \u2014 and discovered he was on parole for rape and kidnapping.<\/p>\n

Then there are the people who go permanently missing, of whom no trace is ever found. Some have been kidnapped and some, emotionally vulnerable kids especially, may have left home and then been snatched and killed. Young women of color have disappeared and not made news headlines at all. Serial killers have played peek-a-boo guessing games with investigators, and the names and whereabouts of some of their victims are never to be known.<\/p>\n

In the 1920s, on a chicken ranch in Riverside County, a mother-and-son pair was abducting boys, molesting them and murdering them with an ax. Some of their remains were found, but no trace was ever found of Walter Collins, a 9-year-old Los Angeles boy who disappeared in 1928. Director Clint Eastwood turned the saga of Walter\u2019s mother\u2019s quest for him into a film, \u201cChangeling,\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mother <\/p>\n

Veronica Rosas, mother of a disappeared son, takes part in a \u201cposada\u201d, a traditional Christmastime procession, held in honor of missing relatives, in front of the National Palace in Mexico City on Dec. 22, 2023.<\/p>\n

(Marco Ugarte \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n

And there are the people, usually in totalitarian countries, who are snatched up by government forces for speaking out against the regime and \u201cdisappeared\u201d \u2014 imprisoned without trials or any public account of what has become of them. The Spanish noun for them is \u201cdesaparecidos,\u201d and English has adapted the word as \u201cthe disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

In parts of California, it is not hard to make a body vanish. An hour\u2019s drive from Los Angeles are deserts, canyons and the thousand square miles of the Angeles National Forest. The 10th victim of the notorious Hillside Strangler \u2014 stranglers, plural, a pair of cousins in Glendale \u2014 was found there, as were other killers\u2019 victims. One man supposed to have been left there and never found was Beverly Hills\u2019 Ron Levin. He invested in and then reputedly conned the 1980s rich-kids \u201cBillionaire Boys Club\u201d private-school students\u2019 investment group. One of its members was convicted of ordering Levin\u2019s murder, but thereafter Levin, or someone resembling him, was sighted hither and yon, on a Greek island, at a funeral [not his own], and behind the wheel of a brown Mercedes in LA.<\/p>\n

\"James <\/p>\n

James Pittman, 34, smiles at his attorney Jeffrey Brody as he is congratulated in Santa Monica Superior Court after pleading guilty for lesser felony charges in a plea bargain giving him prison time of approximately 3 years which he has already served. Pittman was accused of the murder of Ron Levin in the Billionaire Boys Club.<\/p>\n

(Al Seib\/Los Angles Times)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s inevitable that sightings like that come hard on the heels of vanishing acts. Maybe there\u2019s a reward in it, or maybe the reward is just getting your name in the papers, your face on TV.<\/p>\n

Until Earhart disappeared on a round-the-world flight in 1937, New York judge Joseph Crater was the most renowned vanishing act. On the eve of a corruption investigation, he dematerialized from a New York street in 1930, perhaps carrying thousands of dollars from checks he\u2019d just had cashed. Like the late Elvis, Crater was spotted here, there, and everywhere. In 1936, in the deserts of San Diego County, a couple of prospectors and a shopkeeper all declared that a \u201cminer\u201d with a New York accent, a big vocabulary, and smooth, un-minerly palms told them that he was the mystery judge, and then, as \u201cCrater\u201d told one of them, \u201cTake my burros and the mining equipment, and never tell anybody you ever saw me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Aimee Semple McPherson Aimee, shown about 1923, was for years one of the most famous and recognizable women in the country.<\/p>\n

(Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

And then there was Aimee Semple McPherson, the \u201clady preacher\u201d who founded the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. She was for years one of the most famous and recognizable women in the country, which is why her own vanishing act, in May 1926, as she swam off Venice Beach, created a nationwide uproar of despair, and gossip.<\/p>\n

McPherson had immense social as well as religious influence here and with millions elsewhere through her vast church radio network. Her reappearance five weeks later, her implausible account of being kidnapped, and the evidence of her trysting with a married man scorched her reputation and took down some high-profile public figures. This extraordinary saga of Los Angeles, celebrity and religion are laid out in the recent book \u201cSister, Sinner\u201d about McPherson\u2019s vanishing act and the optics of her \u201cresurrection.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s this one, a pioneering one in California criminal law: a crime even without a corpse, the body of evidence \u2014 the corpus delicti<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Evelyn Scott was older and considerably richer than her charmer of a husband, L. Ewing Scott<\/a>, and they lived in Bel-Air. Evelyn disappeared from that home in 1955. She\u2019d gone out to buy tooth powder, her husband said, and never came back.<\/p>\n

In time, investigators found Mrs. Scott\u2019s dentures and eyeglasses behind the backyard incinerator \u2026 but no body. It was a civic guessing game as to where the presumably late Mrs. Scott might be \u2014 maybe under an avalanche of concrete being poured for one of L.A.\u2019s new freeways. Scott, theatrically, pleaded for his wife to return to clear his name. The actor and L.A. pioneer Leo Carrillo testified that a couple of men showed up at his house one night as he was watching TV to pressure him to clear Scott\u2019s name and declare that he had spotted Mrs. Scott in Brazil.<\/p>\n

In a case already staggering with dramatic twists, this may have been the best: Scott\u2019s lawyer pointed out that no body had ever been found, and indeed, Mrs. Scott might walk through this courtroom door \u201cat any minute.\u201d Jurors turned to look. Aha, the lawyer said \u2014 that shows you don\u2019t believe that her death has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n

Then the prosecutor had his turn. Yes, he agreed, every head had turned toward the door \u201cexcept one\u201d \u2014 Scott\u2019s. He didn\u2019t look, because he killed her. Cue the \u201cPerry Mason\u201d theme, except this jury voted to convict.<\/p>\n

\"Patt <\/a> <\/p>\n

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison<\/p>\n

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People who know nada about aviation history still know who Amelia Earhart is. People who know squat about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1871,28750,2789,88203,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,1555,88202,33587,1554,78113,592,88204,88205,2601,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-187556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-act","9":"tag-amelia-earhart","10":"tag-body","11":"tag-husband-and-wife-pair","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-la-headlines","14":"tag-la-news","15":"tag-los-angeles","16":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","17":"tag-los-angeles-news","18":"tag-los-angeles-times","19":"tag-man","20":"tag-mrs-scott","21":"tag-mystery","22":"tag-name","23":"tag-nancy-guthrie","24":"tag-people","25":"tag-ron-levin","26":"tag-trace","27":"tag-victim","28":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}