On the 10th day of the search for Nancy Guthrie, reporters camped outside of the missing woman’s home noticed a strange man strut right up to the front door. It had been more than a week since the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie had disappeared, and authorities had just announced they had a new lead from Ring footage of what looked like a “potential subject” attempting to tamper with the doorbell camera on the morning of her disappearance. So now who was this unknown person, clad in a gray top and black pants, carrying a large black bag and striding to the door?
It was a Domino’s delivery driver.
“Never seen something quite like this,” local ABC reporter Ford Hatchett wrote on X. “Delivery was for an independent journalist out here who is live streaming, @JLRINVESTIGATES. A viewer ordered it for him.”
JLR Investigates is the name of the YouTube channel run by Jonathan Lee Riches, who describes himself as a “fearless investigator” and has more than 540,000 subscribers that watch his dispatches from outside Guthrie’s Tucson home.
“We can’t believe we have to say this, but media on scene: please do not order food delivery to a crime scene address,” the Pima county sheriff’s department wrote in a statement. “This interferes with an active investigation. Please also respect private property laws.”
National media has descended on crime scenes since the dawn of tabloids more than 100 years ago. The modern media circus only became more invasive with the advent of the 24/7 news cycle. The Nancy Guthrie investigation is no different; but this time an even more meddling type of reporter has come to define the three-week investigation: the true crime streamer.
Self-declared sleuths like Riches have inserted themselves into the investigation, broadcasting their videos to a sizeable audience.
He posts stream with titles like, “BREAKING – MANHUNT!!! NANCY GUTHRIE KIDNAPPING – LIVE” but once you click through you mostly see Riches simply sitting in his car. On day 19 of the investigations he was at one point documenting a police shift change at the scene of the crime. “Bathroom break,” he narrated to his 29k viewers.
Riches does try to offer more than just dry footage of the house’s exterior. He has “investigated” tips, such as an unrelated car tow and hospital airlift, as if these leads might go somewhere. Followers might appreciate Riches’ tenacity, but the false tips breed misinformation. State representative Alma Hernandez slammed “wannabe reporters” who “have now caused more harm than good to this entire situation and put this serious case in jeopardy”.
Before his true crime pivot, Riches spent time in jail for wire fraud. He made headlines in 2012 for driving to Connecticut in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy posing as the elementary school shooter’s uncle. He is known for his prolific filing of absurd lawsuits – the San Francisco Chronicle estimated more than 4,000 by 2024 – including one against the Kardashian family for participating in al-Qaida training. He once filed a phoney lawsuit against representative Gabrielle Giffords, posing as the man who shot her and killed six people in 2011. He even attempted to sue the Guinness Book of World Records for dubbing him the world’s most litigious person – but representatives for Guinness said they did not have that record category. The suit was later dismissed.
Riches did not respond to a request for comment. He told the Arizona Republic that the fake lawsuit against Giffords was a joke he filed to entertain himself in prison and was in bad taste. For this he would be sentenced to five years’ probation on a charge of making false statements.
Riches is one of a handful of livestreamers that have relocated to Tucson. Jimmy Williams, a former construction worker turned full-time streamer, spends up to six hours sitting in a lawnchair outside the Guthrie family home. Williams, who streams on his channel Dolly Vision, told an Australian reporter his trips are totally funded by viewer donations: “the plane tickets, the hotels” all come courtesy of his audience.
In one video Williams reported on “shocking chaos” at the scene of the crime – which ended up being a fight the streamer had with a neighbor over parking.
As well as the streamers there are such figures as Megyn Kelly getting involved. Kelly used to be part of the institutionalized media: after her lengthy stint at Fox News she was briefly Savannah Guthrie’s colleague on the Today show. Now she’s an independent journalist, self-producing a daily talkshow, and reporting on unverified online theories about the Gutheries (although she did not descend on their home). On her show she floated an eerie social media theory about Savannah Guthrie’s plea to her mother’s captors. Kelly discussed a video message in which Savannah Guthrie spoke of her mother’s kindness and then said: “Talk to her, and you’ll see.” The line mirrors a quote from the horror film The Silence of the Lambs, where a deranged serial killer kidnaps a senator’s daughter. In the movie, the senator releases a similar statement, using the same phrase. As Kelly put it: “The choice of words could be completely coincidental, or it might not be.”
This week, after Riches and others suggested Guthrie family members might be responsible for the crime (and Kelly said she wouldn’t rule the family out as suspects), sheriff Chris Nanos refuted the allegation, writing: “The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case. To suggest otherwise is not only wrong, it is cruel … Please, I’m begging you the media to honor your professionalism and report with some sense of compassion and professionalism.
But Nanos’s statement is directed toward an inherently unprofessional media: most of these true crime streamers lack any streaming or good reporting judgment. In the past, they might have covered solved murders or decades-old cold cases – not breaking news. That’s changed in recent years, says Kate Winkler Dawson, a producer and senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at University of Texas at Austin.
“I first noticed it with Gabby Petito,” said Dawson, referring to the vlogger who was killed by her boyfriend while the pair documented their van life through the American west. It took almost a month for authorities to discover Petito’s body. “There was a clear and present danger,” Dawson said. “Where is she? There is an entitlement from some folks [online] who don’t feel like they’re getting enough information.”
Petito’s missing van was discovered thanks to dashcam video from another YouTuber, which, to some viewers, validated their involvement in the case. “It perpetuates the belief that folks online hold the key to breaking cases, and sometimes they do, but most of the time it really slows down the case and is unhelpful,” Dawson said.
Mandy Matney was a newspaper journalist in South Carolina who struck true crime podcast gold while covering the crimes of Alex Murdaugh, a lawyer who was found guilty of killing his wife and son. The show, Murdaugh Murders Podcast, doggedly followed the police investigation and subsequent trial, becoming the No 1 podcast on Apple in 2021, and the basis for a Hulu series starring Jason Clarke and Patricia Arquette. Matney says she was “caught in the middle” as a journalist turned social media star.
She said during her reporting she found herself surrounded by true crime influencers. “We weren’t really competing at all with legacy media for scoops,” Matney said. “We were competing with TikTokers and content creators who were just making up news and publishing very baseless tips. It takes years of learning how to vet information [as a journalist] and really falling on your face to learn how to properly source stories and decide what information the public needs to hear.”
After the killing of Rob and Michele Reiner in their Brentwood home – and police charging their son Nick with first-degree murder – reports surfaced of influencers showing up at the scene in hopes of filming macabre, on-the-scene videos. One streamer wore a Burger King hat and yelled racial slurs at reporters; two others drove by filming for their audience while blasting music from their car.
“One of the biggest problems [with this behavior] is the sentiment behind it,” said Dawson. “It’s not to help the case or to inform people. It’s clickbait, a way to make money, and stay relevant in the true crime world.”
Jennifer Youngblood streams under the handle Jay is 4 Justice, which is also the name of her true crime podcast. Youngblood, who is 52 and lives in Clearwater, Florida, spent most of her career in home healthcare and hospice work. She now fully supports herself through true crime. She started streaming in 2018, documenting the case of Christopher Lee Watts, a Colorado man who killed his pregnant wife and two children. She met Riches, the Guthrie streamer, in Facebook groups created to follow various cases.
Youngblood is now in Tuscon, where she’s mostly shadowing Riches and making a few videos of her own about Guthrie. She says he goes out with his tripod, two phones, and a fan in case his phones overheat.
She does not find the presence of streamers, or their lack of standards, problematic. “I think anybody has the right to report on anything they want,” Youngblood said. “The viewers know that Jonathan is not in the know. They know he’s not an investigator. They know he’s not a cop. I think people are intrigued by watching every step of the way.”
Youngblood says that Guthrie’s neighbors are “appreciative” of Riches. “There’s been so many neighbors that have come up and said, ‘We’re so happy you’re here. We’re watching you, we want to see what’s going on. We’re not kept in the loop [from the police].”
Youngblood believes the mainstream media is “bewildered” by Riches’ popularity, and may be feeling a bit of “professional jealousy”, too. “He’s getting millions of views, and that’s what’s got their attention,” she said.
She says she knows all about Riches’ history of wire fraud and phoney lawsuits. It does not bother her. “Everyone wants to talk about his felony background and the things he went through, but I think that people should be celebrated for changing their life and doing good things,” she said. She trusts him to be accurate, saying: “I think his record speaks for itself.”
And what about when streamers do get things wrong? “I think that anytime you have a case of this magnitude, you have misinformation, regardless if there’s people streaming or not,” Youngblood said. “You have forums like X and Reddit. I think that social media itself is the bearer of misinformation.”
Mainstream journalists are mostly appalled by attitudes like Youngblood’s. “One of the unfortunate things is that the public may sort of confuse these vultures and their ghoulish questions and prying with more mainstream, legitimate news outlets,” said Mark Feldstein, who spent 20 years as an on-air investigative correspondent at CNN and ABC News and is now the chair of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland. “They’re just winging it, making it up as they go along, and so it kind of deflates the currency for all journalists.”
