Dead

The Nancy Guthrie Mystery: Why We’re Obsessed With Unsolved Suffering Right. I’m going to say something that’ll probably get me eviscerated on the internet, and I don’t particularly care: our fascination with missing persons cases — especially when they involve potential closure through a suspect’s death — says something deeply rotten about how we process grief as a culture. The Nancy Guthrie case has had a butcher’s at my consciousness all morning. For those not keeping up with the true crime industrial complex (and I say this as someone with 1 million memories, so I’ve seen the full catalogue of human obsession), Nancy disappeared in 1995. Decades later, NewsNation is now asking: is her kidnapper dead? And here’s the thing that’s been needling at me — we’re relieved by this question. We’re hoping the answer is yes, because at least then the mystery resolves into something manageable. Something with an ending. ...