Nancy Guthrie Update: Why the "Sloppy" Suspect Hasn't Been Caught — And Why Nanos Can't Be Removed

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4:13graduating from being guest to co-host. And of course, your insight just, you know, completely, I'd say, priceless on all these cases that we've been talking about for the last many years. Really excited for you to be here in this capacity and to join in the conversations with all of our guests throughout the week as well. So for folks wondering, well, what about the other guests? They're still here too. Robin's going to be with us on those conversations as well. So, welcome. You can see the smile on my face is being my goosebumps are going, you know, when you feel, you know, so funny, we talk about such unhealthy things all the time, but when you're part of a healthy group, you know, you just get excited. Yeah. It is a great, it is a great pleasure to be with you all. It's a healthy group, a healthy group talking about unhealthy things. Yes, exactly. We have spent now four weeks going on five dissecting every visible detail in the Nancy Guthrie case on the suspect. And we're going to talk about the Nancy Guthrie case

5:20in two different lanes here this morning. We're going to talk about the suspect and we're going to talk about the investigation and the myth of competency of each of that, of each because we're looking at this suspect. That's what we're going to talk about first. The Walmart backpack, the awkward holster, the improvised camera cover or whatever that is there. And the assumption underneath all of this is that this guy knew what he was doing from some and other saying, well, look how sloppy he is. He's grabbing foliage to cover the camera. Both, you can't really have one, you can't really have him both coexisting, being competent and incompetent at the same time. I don't know where maybe you can. Let's jump into all of this because this is something that I think a lot of people are trying to run through their mind with some sort of sensibility.

6:21And I think a lot of it comes down to we do we sometimes expect things to be bigger and more grand and and have a greater meaning than they actually are in real life. Yeah, you know, as I texted you non-stop over the weekend, as I typically do when I start doing my program prep, the interesting thing that happens to us, especially when we're dealing with cases that hit a national level, which is the ones we typically cover, is that each of us, including us, we create a confirmation bias and we've talked about confirmation biases all the time and our confirmation biases are based upon things we've been exposed to throughout our lives, especially in a recency. And especially with cases like this, our confirmation biases typically come from two things. One, what we see and absorb from TV. And things like criminal minds and all these great Hollywood and television productions that

7:22talk about the ideal idyllic world in which investigations take place, which there never is that way. And also what our hopes and expectations are as set by people that talk about these things, pundits like us and others. And so when an individual then starts consuming the reality of what is based on the confirmation bias they have and they mismatch, they think something's a miss and they start loving the poke holes at it. And especially when you don't have the 24 hour turnaround of resolution or the one hour resolution that we're used to seeing on TV, I know a lot of people have said this, but it still hits us that something must be a miss. And then what happens is people that love poking holes and what I love about what we do is we don't poke holes, we examine someone pokes a hole. Let's go down the rabbit hole. Someone pokes a hole. Let's examine that. What happens is is that when something doesn't go the way we want it to go, we're going to start having a negative confirmation bias only looking for what someone's doing wrong. What's going wrong

8:25in the investigation. So we're always going to see things that are going wrong. And will we always find it? Yes, because it's human nature. No one is perfect. No investigation is perfect. But what happens is you start ignoring all the things that are going right. And so that's what I've done and continue to do is like, I just always, for some reason, I have this ability to take this pragmatic objective of you. Let's look at it that. Let's look at the research and let's do comparisons to all these things. And so on par, and as goes with both the investigation itself, as well as the culprit, you know, what was normal? What wasn't normal? What stood out? What doesn't stood out? And to your point when you started out in your opening, you can have both at the same time, I think. I think this guy that approached the door, he had reps. I remember the first time I saw that video image of him. So covered up. So this is so well covered, you know, face every, I mean, just think about this. He was just to compare contrast to coberger and him. That was coberger's first rep

9:25in trying to go in and kill someone. And he was floppy. He did a lot of things right, based on what he thought was going to happen. And then things went sideways when you had stress escalation, hit things didn't go the way he wanted. He leaves nice. He's behind DNA and video footage of cars, all this thing when a rye and also what he was wearing. It was striking to them. And then you look at this guy, he had reps of hiding identity, I think, because you haven't found much. There were still flaws in it. And when he hit things, he wasn't expected. That's when we started seeing it with a little chaos for him, like taking branches and putting over a ring canton thing, or even go back to the door selection. I think his selection of going in that front door, not a side door side window back by the pool. That was a major booboo on his part because there was no ring cams back there. Well, that to me, that's what strikes me about the whole damn thing is being off is he went to the front door. He wasn't prepared for a doorbell camera.

10:30But yet he has reps in this. How can the two both be true? I guess that's, I mean, to me, I don't know, I mean, I'm not a criminal. I'm not hitting up houses. But even without doing that, the first thing, if someone said, Tony, today's physical challenge on double dare is breaking into your neighbor's house. You're not going to be arrested. Just go get the flag in the upstairs, get on the hamster wheel and then you get it and you run out and you get covered in slime. Something like that. It was like a non-threatening evil thing to do. But if I were to do that and they were like, okay, you got to kind of plan this out. The first thing I'd be thinking of, doorbell, you don't want to get caught. So we don't want to, you can't be identified. That's the first thing that would be on my mind. How is that not the first thing that's on this guy's mind that supposedly has some sort of reps here? So here's a, here's a way to think about it and thought experiment. So it, and all the nonverbal experts out there saying that he was fluid.

11:33He didn't stress anything. He looked, you know, completely natural of doing what he's doing at their front door because he didn't have halting behavior. But like you said, he was a little weird with that ring cam on the front. So what would make something like that happen? What would make behavior like that? If he was grabbing reps and breaking an entry in of homes that didn't have ring cams, that stands to reason. What kind of homes don't have that? Is it a Nancy Guthrie kind of home or is it a lower income kind of home? See what I mean? Or the age of the resident type of home too. I guess that's something else to consider in this, in this equation because, I do not know the demographics of the neighborhood. I mean, it's kind of a blanket statement to say that like everybody down there is older and retired. That's not true by any stretch of the imagination. But there is a higher population of that there. And if you're in a higher income neighborhood, bigger homes, older homes, statistically, you're probably going to have a more older,

12:37wealthier residents that may also not be as technologically inclined. So that may also then lead to maybe not as many ring doorbells that all of us in the demographic of 25 to 64 have. And you get above that, you go 65 plus, I would imagine your amount of people with ring doorbells dramatically drops. So maybe that's part of it too. I'm just kind of openly throwing that into the conjecture. So basically what we're looking at is what looks like normal natural behavior that he has reps in and what doesn't. And obviously the way he took care of that ring cam was different than what he was expecting. Or he's just that stupid thinking that thing would work again. And I know people like to jump to, well, if he's that stupid, how come he hasn't been caught yet? Well, it doesn't mean just because you haven't been caught doesn't mean you're smart. It just means that what you did was good enough today not to get caught because there's a lot of really dumb people that had ever been caught. Dumb luck plays a lot into these things as well. But I,

13:43because I will never, ever give credit to people that do this type of thing as having high intelligence or high EQ or IQ. Well, and two, if we look at, if we look at just B and E's and the amount that take place and the amount that actually gets solved, if this was that gone bad, good chunk of them never get solved. And if this was so in its simplicity, people get away with that shit all the time. The fact that we have a missing person here with it who could possibly be dead, it makes it a different type of case because it doesn't, if she's dead, let's assume she's dead for the sake of the argument. It makes it a different type of case because it wasn't, I'm going to go with probably not intentional homicide here. Something happened. It was not exactly what another homicide case may look like in terms of how

14:46they would investigate it because essentially it's just the caveat here. The one off here is the fact that there's a body they had to get rid of as well. And if it was as simple as picking her up and taking her out, it's basically a B and A. That took a person with them. And if they know to dispose of the person or it, I don't know, it changes the dynamic. It really, this is a not, this doesn't fit the traditional B and E route. This doesn't fit the traditional route of a kidnapping. This doesn't fit the traditional route of a homicide because I think it was never meant to be that. It was meant to be something far simpler, far less involved. And this is what we got. And somebody who knows now how not to get caught. Yeah. Well, if you look at, and I'm seeing all the comments, which is great. And again, I just, I just played the averages of the research and the research still edges about 60% that this was a solo act, but could there be other people accomplices involved in that side house? Yeah, there's

15:47all kinds of things that could happen in this. But if you look at the intent, oh, I always go back to intent. As I said, John Douglas, your first profile in the FBI says is that you've got to look at the intent. If the intent in some way was profit, either profiting by taking her and branching in her or profit by stealing something, complete failure. That's what I'm talking about. Now, successful, successfully getting away so far, but the intent was a complete failure. And if someone says, because I hear it out there with the conspiracy theorist, the intent was to get back at Nancy to not Nancy, but Savannah to make her suffer and all these things. Okay. Well, if we look at all the research on that, there is always then some messaging that goes out, especially it's something about this. If for some crazy reason that the messaging going into TMZ was anywhere related, not a spearfishing attempt, like I think it is in others, then why not put out somewhere in media that, hey, this was because Savannah was X, Y, and Z.

16:49And it's not there because it wasn't. There was a profit motive in here in some way. So if people want to believe it was for her abduction, okay, that didn't work. Or for people like me that I think it was a B&E that went sideways, still failed. So that's where you always got to go back to what was the intent, where did it fall apart? And what did this guy do? Well, he hit his identity good enough today to not have it happen. I think people oftentimes conflate, sophisticated with successful. Sometimes simple can be successful. Very simple can be successful. And that might be what we're looking at here. Yeah. I think so. Man, we've covered so many cases where the simplest answer is usually what happens. The more time that passes and the less information we have, the more we like to fill the gaps with conjecture. And a lot of times the conjecture will spool out of control. And it's easy to cascade out. I remember you made you made such a profound statement

17:51a couple of weeks ago when you said it's not a far leap. But when you cascade so many conspiracies on this and then we think it's this and then this the leap from here to here of crazy is so small. But when you then go back down to the grassroots level of what's the intent? The intent is profit. It failed. And what could be the profit? And I'll still entertain both sides at the main intent was abduction or the main intent was being ego and sideways. Either way, complete failure, except in the fact that he hit his identity well enough to not be found yet. When we're this far in now, we're going on week five. And seemingly at least on the outside, we don't know much. They seem to still be asking the public for any information that that they can glean off of it. Do you think we're ever going to figure out who this guy is at this point? Or you know, statistically, there's a lot of these cases that just go nowhere.

18:52The fact that we have a microscope on this doesn't necessarily change that fact. It just means more of us are watching. But not getting an answer to things like this, a missing person's case. That's incredibly common. The latter is not. Yeah. I got two sides of this one too, Tony. Yeah. The probability at this point of finding her, it diminishes more and more every day. Again, the research says that we are more and more in the likelihood of not. But I know we'll cover this in the next segment. But if you look at the success rate of Pena County Sheriff's Office when it comes to solving homicides or abductions like this last year, they had 12 or 12, they're 100%. I don't want to say like this because I think like this caveats into those type of a bucket. I don't think this is the same bucket. Right. But so we have a missing person that inevitably is going to be in a homicide. I think so. When you look at strictly

19:54homicides, that's where they have what I'm saying by when I say that their success rate of clearance rate, their investigators are really, really good. I think they're detectives. And as we said, this from the beginning too, I even from the very beginning kind of dismissed the sheriff to the side because kind of the vibe I was getting from from the investigative side, seeing pretty spot on. I saw a lot of movement. I saw a lot of things happening at that investigative level that's below the executive level that is the mouthpiece of the organization. And when I did the deep deep dives this past week and I was I was even more impressed than I thought it was going to be by it. So their investigators are some of the best in the country. So if you're looking at national average, the probability is low. But if you're looking at Pena County, probably it's high. And I think this is a key point to make. Also, I really wish they would come out and highlight some of these stats to the public because, you know, you have it right now in my mind. We have a two-prong

20:54attack going after the perpetrator of this slash people who are winning to who did this. That are the ones that could call in a tip and say who this was and solve this thing, right? In order to do that, you have to compel them to want to. They have to feel unsafe. They have to feel like the nuisance is closing on on them and they're going to go to prison if they don't come forward. Something like that. Savannah is doing beautiful messaging. Matter of fact, it was it's always pretty interesting to me that after we come out on our show of what we think would be a very good method for her to use to use this empathetic appeal to give that that that olive branch to say, hey, you know, things go sideways. You probably didn't mean it to be like this, you know, to so that you can draw someone out and want to. But in order for them to want to grab that olive branch, there has to be pressure in another area to force them through. That pressure comes from investigation saying we're getting closer. We're getting closer and then giving data points exactly what they're getting closer on not the next day, the share of saying, well, the DNA fell

21:54through. But what you can do is you can roll out stats like I just researched this last week and say, hey, listen, the rate of successful investigations of the turnarounds on this, of clearing rates, best in the country. I mean, this county ranks in the top in the country for clearance rates of not this type of crime, but homicides. That puts pressure on. It does. It does. I think it needs to be caveat, though, with there has been a lot of criticism of his department, a lot of criticism about cutting corners. So I mean, without doing a deal, doing it and the thing is that's another rabbit hole, too, to deep dive into is, okay, well, is there criticism of this? I mean, not just for the sake of criticism of like, oh, you're doing a good job. Let me tear you down. No, if you're doing a good job, great. But how do you have such a good success right here and so much noise around you of distrust and hate? There's something going on here. And there is a lot of issues within the department.

22:58There's a lot of people who have been demoted and they've claimed for political reasons, good investigators, good people who have worked in the department for years, who have contributed to that success rate no longer in those positions. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of questions and a lot of questions of cutting corners on some of those very investigations that have the, you know, 100% success rate. So I guess a question is, you know, how did you get to point of checking the box of successfully, you know, we've investigated this, we got our, the right guy, do we though? That would be an interesting one to go down that rabbit hole, too. And I think it was like 12, I mean, there's not a ton of homicides here every year in this county. I looked at all these numbers. And I even went down to the actual allegations against a sheriff, the internal companies. Yeah. I looked at everything. I said, wait too much time in this in my life. And actually to the viewers comment a few minutes ago, the FBI should have been

23:59called in on lead. Actually, they don't have jurisdiction because it's not cross, it's not cross state. It's only if it's, it remains in the state and at the local level, if it doesn't have interstate things going on. So it could not be handed off as FBI's primary in situation because there's not a statute that the FBI could cover on this one. So that answers that question. And it's not saying that you're wrong. It's like it'd be great, but it's just, there's not a mechanism for that. And when it comes to the internal stuff, because I went down this rabbit hole, too, Tony. So the internal allegations against the sheriff, those allegations actually, they fall in with the norms of every elected to sheriff across the country. Actually, that is actually pretty normal. Now, and I'm saying that the normals acceptable, it's just, it's normal. The vast majority of them are anonymous. There's been two, they're only named by person is actually the deputy and the former one that ran against him. And so those allegations are actually, they're, they're talking

25:01about leadership style internally. They're talking about issues. That's, that is a very, very common complaint. It's not, there's, there's another words, everything internally that they're saying about him is hitting baseline of what typically happens with an elected official in a crime of this case that hits this notoriety. I'm not saying this is not excusing any behavior that we don't like, that we don't think is right. I'm just telling you, it falls within the norms because I went in, it's always funny. I go into my own confirmation bias is saying, I think we probably have something here. I'm going to look, look it up and we'll probably find the smoking gun and we're going to get a great clickbait on it. And we're going to say this guy is bad because of X, Y and Z. You know what happens? Baseline, baseline, baseline, except on the clearance rate. Now, I'm not crediting the share for the clearance rate. I'm crediting his team with the clearance rate. Now, he's the head of it. So he gets credit for it. But when it comes to it, he's on track. Now granted, 12 homicides cleared last year. That's not a lot. But for the county, he has size. It's slightly below the

26:02average of other suburban counties across the country. I got all the stats here. There are a few counties that are better. Maricopa County, with Joe, Arropo Hills, Burrow County, Wake County, Sheriff's Department and Erolli, Tampa, Dallas, these suburbs, they have slightly above his averages for clearance rates, but not much. All the rest across the country for the same size of the population. He's above way above because the clearance rates on them are roughly 50, 60% on the best. So you know what I mean? It's it's you just keep going down the rabbit hole because that way, what I'm hoping to do in this is kind of clear the know calm the noise and let them do their job and then then don't let someone else if you don't like them next time because as he is, is he dislikeable? Yes, does he do things that does his image contrast to what we expect and want him to do? Do we want him to go in basketball games and we're going to the gym the next morning where people can see that he's out and about just living life normally when there's a big investigation on? No, because he doesn't have that kind of self-awareness that he shouldn't be doing that kind

27:02of shit, but he was, but does it affect, but is it affecting the investigation? I don't think it did. Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Brusky and the Hidden Killers podcast. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky. Here now Tony Brusky. 481 votes. That is the margin. Chris Nanos won by in November of 2024 out of nearly a half a million ballots cast in Pima County Sheriff's Race. The difference between Nanos keeping his badge and how they're laughing taking it from him was less than the capacity of a mid-sized concert venue. The board of supervisors now requested outside investigations into his conduct twice. His own Japanese voted no confidence. He put his political opponents on administrative leave weeks before the election in a move that

28:04even fellow Democrats called election interference. And now he's the face of the most high profile missing person investigation in the country, the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of today's show host Savannah Guthrie and the criticism has gone from local grumbling to national scrutiny. So with all of that, with the documented complaints and the razor thin mandate and the investigations and the national spotlight, what can actually be done to remove him? It's a question a lot of people are throwing around. The answer is the part that should genuinely concern people, not just in Pima County, everywhere in Arizona, really everywhere throughout our country, because the answer functionally is almost nothing. An elected sheriff in Arizona occupies one of the most insulated positions in American government and the levers that people

29:06assume exist, the ones they talk about on social media, the ones they demand, their supervisors pull either don't work or the way people think or don't exist at all. We're going to get into why that is and why Danis is seemingly being able to operate the way he is really without consequence. Don't like me? Too bad. You can't get rid of me. Disagree with me? I don't care. You can't get rid of me. Can I just say a bunch of crazy random shit out there and contradict myself, left and right? Maybe not really give anybody confidence in this investigation. In fact, make everybody feel far less confident. Don't care. Doesn't matter. Can't get rid of me. That's what's going on. That's the reality of the situation. It is. Give me your thoughts in the comments section on YouTube and on our sub-stack. I'm going to go through and explain this in

30:09greater detail so you fully understand. Press subscribe while we're doing it to understand why you have to understand what a sheriff actually is under Arizona law. And it's not what most people assume. Under the Arizona Constitution article 12 section 3, the sheriff is constitutionally created independently elected officer. That's what he is. Not appointed by the board of supervisors, not subordinate to the board of supervisors. Not answerable to the governor. The sheriff is elected directly by the voters of the county and holds that office in an independent constitute as an independent constitutional officer for a four year term. The board of supervisors and the sheriff are legally speaking co-equal. The board controls the budget. That's their leverage. They can fund or defund. They can publicly criticize. They can pass resolutions expressing their displeasure, but they cannot fire the sheriff. They cannot suspend the sheriff. They cannot override

31:10his operational decisions or tell him how to run an investigation or go pound sand. This was reinforced just last year in 2025. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that in Sanchez v. Maricopa County that a county cannot remove a sheriff from office absent specified constitutional circumstances unrelated to the exercise of law enforcement authority. The court went way out of its way to say that the relationship between a board of supervisors and a sheriff is not hierarchal. These are not employer and employee. These are parallel elected officials with separate constitutional mandates. So when people say the board of supervisors should do something about nanos, the board has essentially done everything it legally can. It's requested investigations twice. It publicly called him out after the lap in suspension. It sought outside review from both the Arizona attorney general and the US attorney. These are the tools. That's the whole toolbox right

32:17there. And once you sent those letters and made those votes, you're done. So what about the mechanisms that theoretically exist beyond the board? That seven of you are screaming at me right now saying, what about this? Well, there's three. Let's talk about those three. And each one is either functionally impossible legally in applicable or already been tried. The first is the recall election. Arizona Constitution article eight part one provides that any elected official can be recalled by the voters. The mechanism is real. It's in the Constitution. People point to it like it's a fire alarm that you just kind of pull and it works. It's not. It's more like assembling a fire truck from scratch in a burning building. Here's the math. The trigger or two trigger. A recall election for the Pima County Sheriff

33:18petitioners need valid signatures equal to 25% of the total votes cast in the last general election for that office in 2024. Approximately four hundred eight seven thousand three hundred one votes were cast in the sheriff's race. Twenty five percent of that is roughly one hundred twenty one thousand eight hundred twenty five valid verified signatures. You have one hundred and twenty days to collect them. Go. It's just over a thousand verified signatures per day every single day for four months straight. And that's the number you need to survive verification. Not the number you need to collect. Signatures get thrown out for bad addresses, eligible handwriting, people who aren't registered in the right district. Circulator errors missing dates in any real world petition drive you plan on a rejection rate realistically to land on one hundred twenty one thousand eight hundred twenty five

34:21clean signatures. You need to collect somewhere in the range of a hundred and forty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand raw signatures. That requires an organized funded sustained grassroots infrastructure operating across the county. That stretches every nine thousand square miles with the population nearing a million people. For context, the most famous recall effort in the Arizona history targeted governor Evan Meckum in 1987. That was a statewide effort with a massive institutional support widespread media coverage and bipartisan outrage over canceling Martin Luther King Day. It succeeded. The Meckum was impeached before the recall election took place. A county level recall of a sheriff in a county where the electorate is split almost perfectly down the middle with no institutional machinery already in place. That's a near impossibility under current conditions. And even if it somehow succeeded, even if every signature held up and the recall election was called, Nannos would appear on the ballot as a candidate. Other candidates could file the run

35:24against him. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Nannos could win his own recall election. And if he does, no further recall petition can be filed against him for the remainder of his term, unless the petitioners reimburse the county for the full cost of the prior recall election. So the recall exists on paper. In practice, it's a mechanism designed for a level of civic mobilization that almost never materializes. So there's that. If you're like, whoa, okay, so that one's not going to work. The second lever is criminal prosecution. If an elected official is convicted of felony, that's a path to removal. And this is the one people have been banking on. Whether they realize it or not, the Board of Supervisors has twice asked outside agencies to investigate Nannos. The first time was in 23, of course, handling of the Ricky Garcia sexual assault case, a situation where a sergeant in his department was accused of assaying a fellow deputy. And Nannos allegedly put the

36:30internal investigation on hold. Supervisors voted three to two to request an Arizona attorney general or DPS to investigate attorney general Chris Mays accepted that referral. Her office conducted the investigation. The result, no criminal wrongdoing found case closed. The second time was in November of 24 after Nannos placed laughing on administrative leave and suspended the head of the deputies union in the final weeks of the election. Supervisors voted unanimously to request both the Arizona AG and the US attorney investigate whether those actions constituted criminal conduct or election interference. The AG's office acknowledged the request beyond that silence. No charges have been filed. No public update has been issued. If charges were to materialize, they'd require trial, which could take months or years at a conviction, which requires perfectly under reasonable doubt. The bar isn't just high. It's prosecutorial, not political, bad judgment, public embarrassment, operational failures,

37:37thin skinned press conferences, even conduct that looks retaliatory. None of that is automatically criminal. And two investigations have now either closed without charges or stalled without public action. So there's your other one. What about the third lever, you ask? What's behind door number three? Well, it's a brand new car. A third lever is the one that gets thrown around the most unsocial media and in comments sections. And it is the one that flat out does not apply impeachment. People hear the word and assume it works like it does on a federal level that some legislative body can bring charges and remove the official. In Arizona, impeachment exists under article eight part two of the state constitution. It applies to the governor and other state and judicial officers except justices of courts, not of record. That language matters. A county sheriff is not a state officer. The sheriff is a county officer created by article 12 of the constitution elected by

38:42county voters operating under county jurisdiction. The Arizona House of Representatives cannot impeach a county sheriff. The Arizona Senate cannot try a county sheriff. There is no version of Arizona impeachment law that reaches county level elected officials. It's not a matter of political will. It's not a matter of votes. The constitutional authority does not exist. You could get every single member of the Arizona legislature to agree that a county sheriff should be removed and they would have no legal mechanism to do it. Impeachment is off the table. Not difficult, not unlikely, just legally impossible. And this is where the frustration needs to shift from the specific of the systematic or the systemic here because this isn't really about Chris Nanos. It's about a structural gap in democratic accountability that's been baked into

39:43Arizona's government since 1912. The year the Titanic sunk. Arizona's constitution was written by people who were deeply skeptical of concentrated government power. It was one of the most progressive populous state constitutions of its era. Direct democracy tools like recall, initiative, and referendum were embedded into the foundation specifically because the framers didn't trust appointed officials, didn't trust backroom deals, and one of the voters to have the final say that instinct was admirable. The unintended consequences is that between elections, there's almost no meaningful check on an independently elected county officer. The sheriff answers to the voters every four years. Between those elections, the only realistic mechanism is a recall that requires a mobilization effort. Most communities simply cannot execute. A criminal prosecution that requires conduct rising to the level of a

40:45felony or an impeachment process that constitutionally cannot touch them. The system that was designed to protect elected officials from political interference also protects them from accountability. Those two things aren't the same, but the constitution treats them like they are. So where does that leave Pima County right now? Well, Nanos won't face voters again until 2028. His current term runs through January 29. A recall would require an unprecedented signature gathering operation in a politically divided county with no existing infrastructure to support it. The AG investigators' investigations rather have either produced nothing or gone quiet. The Board of Supervisors has used every tool it has, and the Guthrie case has put the sheriff's department under a level of national scrutiny that Nanos himself has admitted he's not used to. He said publicly that he's not accustomed to people hanging on his every word and holding him a

41:47countable for what he says. I mean, that's the craziest line I think of this whole damn thing. Not used to being people holding him accountable for what he says. That's the job being accountable for what you say in following through. Sorry, it's a key element of it and you're not you. Well, get used to it. I don't know what else to tell you. You're not used to it. It's a remarkable thing for an elected law enforcement official to say out loud. The honest answer, the one that isn't satisfying but is the truth, is that vying a criminal indictment that nobody currently sees coming. Chris Nanos serves his Pima County sheriff until the voters decide otherwise. That is the system. The people who wrote Arizona's Constitution wanted to make sure the government couldn't

42:49remove an official the people chose. So the people got what they voted for. Like it or not. But they apparently never considered is what happens when the people want to remove that official too and find out they can't. So hopefully that answers some of your questions about why you can't just up in out nanos. Give me your thoughts in the comments section on YouTube or our sub stack the links are in the description. Sub stack. Check that out. It's a we've been up there since the beginning of the new year. Great community growing there got over a thousand members now. We're getting pretty damn close to around there. Just a bunch of just some of our our most, you know, hard core I would say true crime fans, great opinions, great thoughts. If you want to be part of that community, do check it out hidden killers dot sub stack.com. It's free to join right now. There's no paywall

43:50at this moment. You can check it out. The link is in the description. Of course, you can also comment through YouTube at any time. Just search hidden killers with Tony brusky and wherever you get podcasts, Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever it may be go hit subscribe on our program. You can take us with you anywhere you go so you don't miss any of our reporting. I look forward to continuing our conversation off the air in the comments section on sub stack in YouTube until them. My name's Tony brusky. We'll talk again real soon. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try zippercrooter for free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology

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