Nancy Guthrie has been missing for 24 days. None of the several leads pursued by the authorities have brought forward any suspects in connection with her disappearance from her southern Arizona home in late January.
Guthrie’s family has issued several public pleas to the alleged abductors to return their 84-year-old mother home.
“We still believe. We still believe in a miracle. We still believe that she can come home, hope against hope, as my sister says. We are blowing on the embers of hope,” Guthrie said.
Nancy Guthrie’s daughter and “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, in her latest video message posted Tuesday, said family members know the possibility that their mother might not be alive, but they still want her home.
“We also know that she may be lost,” Savannah Guthrie said. “She may already be gone.”
Guthrie said the family still wants Nancy Guthrie to come home and is offering a reward of up to $1 million for any information that could help in this case.
The Guthrie family is also donating $500,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which aids families coping with loss and actively looking for their lost loved ones.
She ended the video message with a plea: “So, please, if you hear this message, if you’ve been waiting and you haven’t been sure, let this be your sign to come forward, tell what you know, and help us bring our beloved mom home. So that we can either celebrate a glorious, miraculous homecoming or honor the beautiful, brave, courageous, and noble life that she has lived. Please be the light in the dark.”
Nancy Guthrie was last seen on the evening of Jan. 31, when she visited her daughter Annie’s home for a family dinner and game night.
Where does the Nancy Guthrie investigation stand?
Although the police haven’t identified a suspect or a person of interest, the FBI released photos and videos from a surveillance camera on the front porch of Nancy Guthrie’s Tucson home.
The person appears to be tampering with the camera in the video released by FBI Director Kash Patel. The individual wore a mask and gloves and appeared to have a firearm.
The authorities conducted searches of several roadways in the Catalina Foothills area, where the Guthrie family lived, and took two black gloves discarded on the side of the road into evidence. The DNA found on the gloves and at the Guthrie home hasn’t yet produced a DNA match in the federal databases.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department addressed online theories about the person in the surveillance video appearing at Nancy Guthrie’s front door on a different day prior to her disappearance.
“We are aware that doorbell images released earlier in the investigation depict a suspect in different stages of attire, including with and without a backpack,” the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
“There is no date or time stamp associated with these images. Therefore, any suggestion that the photographs were taken on different days is purely speculative,” the statement added.
The highly unusual circumstances behind Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance.
Several details and the circumstances surrounding this case make it highly unusual.
Uncommon victim profile
Abductions of elderly women in their 80s are rare. According to the FBI, out of a total of nearly 50,000 abductions between January 2025 and January 2026, about 1% of victims were people over the age of 70.
Nancy Guthrie also has a connection to a high-profile individual — her daughter, the co-anchor of an NBC show.
Guthrie is also more vulnerable because of her health issues. She had a pacemaker that investigators are trying to locate by deploying “signal sniffers.”
Chilling evidence and ransom
The FBI’s released images of the person of interest appear to showcase a masked gunman.
Even though the authorities found gloves, potentially worn by the person in the video, the DNA doesn’t match any profiles in the federal database.
A Tucson news station received a ransom note in the early days after Guthrie went missing.
Authorities did not make the details of the note public, but reports later revealed it contained specific details about Nancy Guthrie’s home and the clothes she was wearing the night she was taken. It also demanded $4 million in bitcoin as payment by Thursday, Feb. 5, or else the demand would increase to $6 million by Monday, Feb. 9.
But the abductors never made contact with the family around those two deadlines or otherwise.
No clear motive
Aside from Nancy Guthrie’s connection to a high-profile individual — her daughter, Savannah, the co-anchor of an NBC show — no clear motive or suspect has emerged in Guthrie’s disappearance.
Many criminologists also point out that this case violated the typical abduction circumstances, where a family member is the perpetrator. But the Pima County Sheriff’s Office cleared the entire Guthrie family.