The person may have thought they had covered their tracks… but did they miss something crucial?As the search for Nancy Guthrie intensifies, a former detective is pointing to what he believes is a critical mistake made by the masked individual seen in the recently recovered doorbell footage.Over the last few days, the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department have worked closely with private sector partners to recover images and video from Nancy’s home that were previously lost, corrupted, or inaccessible.According to authorities, the video was recovered from residual data located in backend systems, a technical breakthrough that has now produced previously unseen images.

Those images show an armed individual appearing to tamper with a camera at Nancy’s front door on the morning of her disappearance. The masked figure was shared publicly by FBI Director Kash Patel in a February 10, 2026, post on X, drawing widespread attention and intense online speculation.But while many focused on the attempt to disable the camera, one former investigator zeroed in on something else: the mask.In an interview with CNN’s Laura Coates, former Police Detective Mike McCutcheon explained why he believes the mask itself may contain a telling flaw. “The mask — they’re not wearing a face covering like over their mouth,” he said, before invoking a classic forensic principle, “Every contact leaves a trace.”