A graduate of Miss Porter's School[1] in Farmington, Connecticut, Gutcheon went on to study at Harvard University, earning a bachelor of arts with honors in English.

[4] In 1978, Gutcheon wrote the narration for a feature-length documentary about the Kirov ballet school in St. Petersburg, Russia, called The Children of Theatre Street, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

[5] Her second novel, Still Missing, was translated into 14 languages, and published in a condensed version by Reader's Digest, a large print edition for the vision-impaired, and made into an audio book.

The finished film, titled Without A Trace, was released by Twentieth Century Fox in February 1983, starring Kate Nelligan, Judd Hirsch, and Stockard Channing.

The controversy was corrected in a 1982 letter to the Editor at The New York Times where Stanley K. Patz, Etan's father, said "We repeatedly stated that we had no quarrel with Beth Gutcheon and that we liked her.