TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – During a news conference on Thursday, Feb. 5, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said he believes technology will be crucial in solving the Nancy Guthrie case.

“There’s a lot of information we have nowadays, right? Because we are surrounded by technology, and we have too much technology on ourselves,” said Dr. Pratik Satam with the University of Arizona.

There isn’t such a thing as too much technology when it comes to a criminal investigation like the Nancy Guthrie case.

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Satam is an industrial control security systems expert and said technology has come a long way in this field. A sentiment Nanos echoed.

“They now have tools and resources that were well beyond what we had when I was in homicide, but the game is the same,” he said.

The new game Nanos is referring to is video. Not only has law enforcement adapted, but so too have criminals.

“What are they doing, covering their plates, removing the camera, whatever it is they know. So it is a cat and mouse thing,” Nanos said.

That’s exactly what happened at Nancy Guthrie’s house the night of her disappearance.

At approximately 1:47 a.m. Feb. 1, the front doorbell camera was ripped off. Just over 30 minutes later, officials said motion was detected on the camera software.

So how is that possible? Satam gave his perspective.

“Maybe there are other sensors on the device, right. Maybe there’s a motion sensor on it, or there’s a proximity sensor on it,” Satam said, “So the camera might not be functional because it was ripped off, but the other sensors could be functional depending on if they have power, and are they operational.”

However, investigators said the video was not available when the motion was detected because Guthrie did not have the required subscription service.

Satam theorized to 13 News why that could be the case.

“Most likely, because you have not paid for it, the video gets overwritten, and if you’re paying for the service, then it gets shipped off to the cloud before it’s overwritten,” he said.

Satam said front door cameras, like Ring, are constantly recording and overwriting the video.

“The question is, in this case, was that file overwritten or not? Forensics can go through the memory, and they can try to recover a file that is not overwritten,” Satam said.

Satam said if the footage was being sent to the cloud or an external hard drive, there’s a higher likelihood of recovery. But if it was just being stored on the camera, those files set for deletion are quickly overwritten because of the lack of memory on the devices.

Which would be a major roadblock in this case.

“If the whole thing is overwritten, then there’s unlikely any way of getting the whole thing back unless there’s a version of it somewhere else.”

Satam said cell phone geo-tracking data is pretty accurate in a neighborhood configured like Catalina Foothills. As long as a phone is turned on, it can track movement as precisely as a few hundred meters, another thing which could be crucial in this investigation.

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