Latest Updates: The Search For Nancy Guthrie
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The F.B.I. and Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff’s Department in Tucson on Friday.Credit…Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
Day 17: Where Things Stand
Family Cleared: Sheriff Chris Nanos of Pima County, Ariz., said in a statement on Monday that members of Nancy Guthrie’s family, including her three children, had been cleared of suspicion in her disappearance. “The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case,” he said.
A Timeline of Events: The case has confounded the authorities, who have given little insight into a possible motive. On Monday they pushed back on reports that it was being treated as a burglary gone wrong. Read more
Progress in the Guthrie case is fitful as the search enters its third week.
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Hopes have soared with each apparent break, but Nancy Guthrie is still missing.Credit…Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
Federal agents and sheriff’s deputies streamed into the quiet desert subdivision by night. They stepped past spiky agave plants and surrounded a house, preparing to serve a search warrant. A couple of miles away, investigators descended on a parked Range Rover and draped it with evidence tape.
For the second time in the excruciating weeks since Nancy Guthrie vanished, Friday’s burst of law enforcement activity in a southern Arizona neighborhood signaled a possible break in a case that has transfixed the country.
But, once again, the authorities later announced a disappointing result: Even after one person was questioned and the S.U.V. was towed away, no arrests had been made and there had been no trace of the 84-year-old Ms. Guthrie.
On Monday, there were few visible signs of significant progress in an investigation that for more than 16 days has frustrated the police and tormented Ms. Guthrie’s family — most visibly, her daughter, “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, whose public pleas for help have reached millions around the world.
Indeed, as the search slogged into its third week, the most notable development was the exclusion of several people as possible suspects: Sheriff Chris Nanos of Pima County said Nancy Guthrie’s three children and their spouses were victims, and asked for an end to speculation about them. “The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious,” he said.
His department has received tens of thousands of tips, combed the neighborhood by foot and by air and enlisted the help of the F.B.I. and other agencies. Still, the authorities have not identified a suspect and they do not know whether Ms. Guthrie is still alive.
The uncertainty has investigators scrambling. Until they find Ms. Guthrie, they must assume she is in imminent danger, which means they are moving faster than normal, said Lance Leising, a retired F.B.I. agent in Phoenix.
“When you do that, you run the risk of hitting dry holes, of swinging and missing,” said Mr. Leising, who also stressed that the public is aware of probably only “5 percent of what investigators know.”
The anticlimactic operation on Friday night echoed a chapter in the investigation that unfolded a few days earlier, when officers descended on Rio Rico, Ariz., about an hour’s drive south of Tucson. They detained one man and held him for hours while they questioned him. Sheriff Nanos thought his team had cracked the case.
But before long, investigators acknowledged they had hit a dead end. They released the man and continued their increasingly desperate search.
Ms. Guthrie was taken in the early hours of Feb. 1, the police have said. She had plans to watch a church service with friends later that morning, and when she did not show, they called her oldest daughter, Annie, who rushed to Ms. Guthrie’s home and found it empty. Blood, which tests would later confirm belonged to Ms. Guthrie, was splattered across the front stoop.
The authorities have released little information about what else they found at the house in the foothills north of Tucson, but Sheriff Nanos said it looked like a crime scene.
The details that have emerged have been ominous.
One day after Ms. Guthrie vanished, a Tucson-area television station received a ransom note purporting to be from her kidnapper. TMZ, the celebrity gossip outlet, received a similar note the next morning and reported that it demanded millions of dollars in Bitcoin for Ms. Guthrie’s return.
The F.B.I. advised the Guthrie family on how to proceed, and Ms. Guthrie’s three children released a statement telling the supposed kidnapper they were “ready to talk.” But the authorities have acknowledged the note may have been sent by an impostor. TMZ reported on Monday that it had received four such communications in all.
Perhaps the most tangible lead materialized on Feb. 10, when federal officials released photos and video recovered from Ms. Guthrie’s doorbell surveillance camera. The haunting images show a masked man approaching the door wearing gloves and a backpack, with what appears to be a handgun holstered at his waist.
The pictures opened up several new investigative avenues. Police officers sought to track down the source of the man’s clothing, which they said may have been purchased at Walmart. Then, on Feb. 12, sheriff’s deputies searching a field two miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home discovered discarded gloves that appeared to match the pair worn by the man in the surveillance video.
Preliminary testing revealed the gloves carried the DNA of an unknown man, and F.B.I. analysts were planning to enter the sample into a database. The process can take about 24 hours, officials said.
As they worked, the area around Ms. Guthrie’s house, once the site of steady activity, grew quiet. Online, armchair investigators puzzled over clues and speculated wildly. And Ms. Guthrie’s family projected hope.
“We still believe,” Savannah Guthrie said in a video posted to social media on Sunday evening
She did not mention a ransom, nor did she reference other details from the case.
Instead, she appealed directly to her mother’s captor: “It is never too late,” she said, “to do the right thing.”
DNA testing could produce results within days.
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The F.B.I. said the glove appeared similar to those worn by the masked man whose image was captured in surveillance footage from Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell camera.Credit…Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
As the Nancy Guthrie abduction case stretches into a third week, investigators — and a public riveted by every mysterious development — have focused on DNA recovered from gloves found near her home.
The F.B.I. said that the gloves, collected last week in a field near the side of a road about two miles from her home near Tucson, Ariz., were sent to a private lab in Florida and that the DNA of an “unknown male” was found on them. That DNA profile will be loaded into the agency’s national database in hopes of identifying the man.
Peter Valentin, chair of the forensic science department at the University of New Haven, said on Monday that the laboratory analysis could produce results within days.
He said investigators would typically swab both the interior and exterior of the gloves to determine the identity of the user and if that person touched someone else — which could produce a second DNA profile.
“DNA is so easily transferred from one surface to another that the glove can tell us a bit of a story, not just give us information about who is wearing the glove,” said Dr. Valentin, a former major crimes detective with the Connecticut State Police.
Ms. Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie, co-host of the “Today” show, was taken from her home on Feb. 1.
The F.B.I. said the gloves appeared similar to those worn by the masked man whose image was captured in surveillance footage from Ms. Guthrie’s doorbell camera. Released by the police last week, the footage shows a person wearing a ski mask, gloves and a backpack while standing at her front door on the morning of her disappearance.
Investigators collected about 16 other gloves near the home. Most of them belonged to searchers who discarded them in the vicinity.
A sheriff’s department spokeswoman said that investigators also discovered DNA on Ms. Guthrie’s property that was neither hers nor that of anyone in “close contact with her.” The police did not release details about where that DNA was found.
Here’s what we know about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie.
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Law enforcement officers outside the home of Nancy Guthrie near Tucson, Ariz., on Feb. 2.Credit…Sejal Govindarao/Associated Press
The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, 84, the mother of the “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie, has gripped the nation, with unverified reports of ransom notes, chilling doorbell camera footage and the fame of Ms. Guthrie’s daughter capturing intense interest.
As the days have passed since her last known sighting, developments have intermittently surfaced but none of them have led to an arrest.
Here’s what we know.
The sheriff clears all of the Guthrie family members.
More than two weeks into the investigation, Chris Nanos, the Pima County sheriff, cleared all members of the Guthrie family, including all siblings and spouses, as possible suspects.
It was the first time that Sheriff Nanos had ruled anyone out in the course of the investigation.
“The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case,” he said in a statement. “To suggest otherwise is not only wrong, it is cruel. The Guthrie family are victims, plain and simple.”
Police seek to match DNA found in gloves.
The F.B.I. on Sunday said that gloves found about two miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home had an unknown man’s DNA on them, and that it would put the DNA profile into a database in an effort to identify the person.
The F.B.I. said that the gloves appeared to match those worn by the man who was captured on Ms. Guthrie’s doorbell camera on the night she was abducted.
The F.B.I. added that most of the other gloves recovered during its searches were those of investigators who had discarded them while conducting sweeps near the home.
A sheriff’s department spokeswoman previously said that investigators found DNA on Nancy Guthrie’s property that was neither hers nor that of anyone in “close contact with her.” The police did not say where the DNA was found.
A flurry of activity happened two miles from Nancy Guthrie’s home.
Late on Friday night, law enforcement officials swarmed an upscale subdivision two miles from Nancy Guthrie’s home in the Catalina Hills area of Tucson, searching a house as well as a Range Rover parked at a nearby Culver’s.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said that a federal court-ordered search warrant was executed at the home. A traffic stop was also conducted, and a person was questioned but there were no arrests.
The police also investigated a house on the edge of the Catalina Foothills neighborhood, a short drive from Nancy Guthrie’s home and the home of her older daughter and son-in-law, the sheriff’s department said.
The authorities briefly detained a man but released him after questioning.
The authorities released surveillance images of a masked suspect.
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This image was recovered from cameras at the home of Nancy Guthrie the morning that she was reported missing near Tucson, Ariz.Credit…Pima County Sheriff’s Department
The authorities released surveillance footage from Ms. Guthrie’s doorstep showing a man standing at her front door, wearing a ski mask, gloves and a backpack on the morning of her disappearance.
The sheriff’s department said the man was wearing clothing that can be purchased at Walmart, but noted that it is also available elsewhere.
A timeline, but few clues.
The investigation into Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance began after she failed to arrive at a friend’s house to watch a live-streamed church service on Feb. 1.
Early in the investigation, Sheriff Nanos described Ms. Guthrie’s home as “a crime scene.”
Ms. Guthrie has limited mobility and requires medication every 24 hours, but is mentally sharp, according to the authorities.
Ms. Guthrie’s pacemaker app showed that it had been disconnected from her phone at 2:28 a.m. on the night of her disappearance, indicating she was no longer near the phone, which was left inside her house.
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Ms. Guthrie was described in a missing person’s notice as “vulnerable.”Credit…Pima County Sheriff’s Department, via Associated Press
The Guthries said they would pay a ransom.
Savannah Guthrie and her siblings have released a series of videos pleading with whoever is involved in their mother’s disappearance to contact them.
They have also said that they were willing to pay for their mother’s return.
“We still have hope and we still believe,” Savannah Guthrie said in a video posted Sunday, two weeks after her mother disappeared. “I wanted to say to whoever has her or knows where she is that it’s never too late.”
Officials were investigating a message.
The authorities said in the week after her disappearance that they were reviewing a message sent to a Tucson television station.
They did not confirm whether it was related to a purported ransom note sent to several news outlets after Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance, which demanded millions of dollars in Bitcoin.
Savannah Guthrie withdrew from NBC’s Olympics coverage.
Savannah Guthrie, 54, is best known as one of the anchors of the NBC morning show “Today,” a job she has held since 2012.
She joined NBC News in 2007, after working in local news and as a lawyer. She did not go to Italy for the Milan-Cortina Olympics, where she had been expected to play a key role in NBC’s coverage of the Games.
Savannah Guthrie grew up and attended college in Tucson, Ariz. She lives in New York with her husband, the communications consultant Michael Feldman, and their two children.
Johnny Diaz, Neil Vigdor, Claire Fahy, Reis Thebault, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, John Yoon, Jonathan Wolfe and Hannah Ziegler contributed reporting.
As eyes focus on the Guthrie case, one police chief reflects on his time in the spotlight.
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Moscow, Idaho, faced intense national attention after the 2022 killings of four students at the University of Idaho.Credit…Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times
When four University of Idaho students were gruesomely killed in 2022, James Fry, then the chief of the Police Department in Moscow, Idaho, knew it was the kind of case that, if he didn’t handle it well, could cost him his job.
In less than a week, the police parking lot filled up with news trucks, journalists inundated his office with interview requests and the public overwhelmed his officers with tips. “It was almost like everybody landed in Moscow at once,” he recalled in a recent interview.
As the national spotlight grew brighter, questions began to circulate about whether Mr. Fry and his team were up to the task of completing the investigation.
“It’s probably something that no one ever expects to happen in their career,” he said. “When there’s that big of a national press influence on a case, it puts a lot of pressure on a police department.”
Like many across the country, Mr. Fry has been closely following the case of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie who went missing more than two weeks ago from her home in the Catalina Foothills just north of Tucson, Ariz. The case has captivated the nation and confounded the authorities, who have yet to give much insight into a possible motive, though the evidence points to a violent abduction.
The crime has put the spotlight on another local official: Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, whose leads a department of about 600 sworn officers.
Much like Mr. Fry in Idaho, Mr. Nanos has become the face of the investigation in Arizona and is under a tremendous amount of pressure to find Ms. Guthrie. “This is really, for me, pretty new, all the media attention,” he said to a group of reporters early on.
Mr. Nanos is leading an investigation full of drama and suspense, with all the elements of a true-crime show, including ransom notes, tearful pleas from the family, false leads and small breaks in the case.
Last week, the authorities released haunting images of a masked man at Ms. Guthrie’s doorstep. Then a person of interest was brought in for questioning but promptly let go. Over the weekend, officials found gloves about two miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home that resembled those worn by the man in the video, and sent them to a lab for DNA testing.
Experts have offered a host of reasons the case has generated broad intrigue. Violence has long been at the center of the nation’s consciousness, and some crimes contain the right mix of celebrity, horror and mystery to inflame the public’s imagination — the Lindbergh kidnapping, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Menendez brothers.
But Ms. Guthrie’s case is also fundamentally rare, an abduction in the middle of the night, possibly by a stranger, said Charles Katz, the director of the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University. Kidnappings more commonly occur in domestic disputes over child custody, he said.
So much national attention can encourage the public to participate and provide tips, which happened last year as officials sought the Brown University school shooter. A tip by a bystander helped the authorities identify the vehicle that the assailant used, leading them to his whereabouts. He was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in New Hampshire.
Solving a case can be a boon for an officer’s career, bringing honors and promotions.
But the mounting pressure can also lead to hasty police work and the arrest of the wrong person, according to Robert Mathew Entman, a retired media and public affairs professor at George Washington University.
There have been some cases “where media pressure seems to have led to identifying the wrong perpetrator. You can go back to Emmett Till,” he said, referring to the 14-year-old boy savagely killed in Mississippi.
In the Idaho murders, four students were stabbed to death in a sleepy college town, some beyond recognition. The media juggernaut arrived in Moscow, a town of 26,000 people, demanding answers. But with few leads, Mr. Fry waited more than three days to have his first news conference.
“I have said many times that it was a failure on my part,” Mr. Fry said. “I should have came out within six to eight hours of us knowing what we had and at least given the community and individuals information on what we were dealing with.”
In the early days of the investigation, the Idaho State Police and the F.B.I. offered resources to address the public’s demands for information. Public information officers fielded tips and coordinated with the media, helping to streamline the law enforcement message.
“If we wouldn’t have done that, honestly, I think our case would have suffered greatly,” Mr. Fry said.
Mr. Fry sees some similarities between the Idaho killings and Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance. The two big breaks in the Idaho case came from video footage of a car in the area at the time of the killings and DNA found on a knife sheath. Those leads led to the arrest of Bryan Kohberger, a Ph.D. student. It took investigators seven weeks to track him down. He pleaded guilty in 2025 to avoid a capital trial.
Investigators in Arizona have secured video footage and are analyzing DNA. Mr. Fry is hopeful they will be able to finish the job.
The former police chief recognizes the toll that these big cases have on officers. He did not have a complete night of sleep until the plea deal, almost two and a half years after the killings.
“I had never had anxiety before all this,” he said. But, he added, “everything that law enforcement officers go through is worth it in the end.
Nancy Guthrie’s friends long for their partner in mahjong and life.
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Nancy Guthrie’s friends stop themselves when they accidentally use the past tense. “Nancy was — is,” they say.Credit…via NBC
Two days before she vanished, Nancy Guthrie was sitting at her living-room mahjong table with some of her closest friends, a log burning in her fireplace. At 84, she was as competitive as ever as she squared off against younger women she had taught how to play.
Before they said goodbye on the afternoon of Jan. 30, Ms. Guthrie checked with one of the players, Anne Burnson, making sure that they were still on to watch church at a friend’s house on Sunday. Their ritual was to gather in the friend’s den and watch a recording of the Manhattan service that Ms. Guthrie’s youngest child, the NBC host Savannah Guthrie, had attended earlier that morning. They even had wafers and grape juice on hand for communion.
But Nancy Guthrie, always punctual, did not arrive at 11 a.m. on Feb. 1. Her friends texted, then called. They contacted Ms. Guthrie’s older daughter, Annie, who rushed to Ms. Guthrie’s home. It was empty.
Now, nearly two weeks after Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance, which the authorities have said they are investigating as an abduction, her friends and family say they are refusing to give up hope of finding her alive.
Her toughness has always surfaced in difficult moments, like when her husband died suddenly in 1988, or when budget cuts threatened a vital public health service at the university where she worked, or even two days before her disappearance, when she insisted on walking to the end of her gravel driveway to get the mail, even if a friend had to help.
When they discuss Ms. Guthrie now, friends stop themselves when they accidentally use the past tense. “Nancy was — is,” they say.
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Nancy Guthrie with her daughter Annie as they celebrated Christmas last year.Credit…via Melissa Manas
With the search for Ms. Guthrie in its 13th day, her closest friends — some speaking publicly for the first time — are trying to avoid fixating on the ominous details. They know about the blood found on her doorstep, the masked figure with a pistol caught on her doorbell camera, the discarded black gloves found by investigators scouring the desert.
Still, they think of the woman who, just days before she disappeared, was speeding through a stack of books, celebrating her birthday with beignets and laughing at the card table.
“I keep thinking about every time I’d go in the kitchen door, and she’d be sitting there at the counter, just how her eyes would always light up as soon as she saw me,” said Ms. Burnson, who has been friends with Ms. Guthrie for 42 years. “That’s when you know you have a real friend.”
Born and raised in northern Kentucky, Ms. Guthrie attended the University of Kentucky, blazing a path as a college journalist decades before Savannah Guthrie would become a morning-show fixture on NBC. Nancy Guthrie, then Nancy Long, covered fraternity and sorority life as the society editor of the student newspaper, penning a column called Social Whirl.
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A clip of one of Ms. Guthrie’s articles from 1963.Credit…The Kentucky Kernel
She and her husband, Charles Guthrie, met on a blind date at a basketball game, Savannah Guthrie has said on her show. They married in 1963, and the family moved to Australia, where Mr. Guthrie worked as a mining engineer.
They moved to Arizona and bought a low-slung home in 1975 in the cactus-studded Catalina Foothills just north of Tucson, a home Ms. Guthrie has lived in for more than 50 years.
She taught Bible study classes, with friends saying she had a special ability to make the lessons applicable to everyday life.
“She’s been a mentor and a teacher and someone that’s really quietly shaped the lives of countless people here,” said Vicki Edwards, 68, who became close friends with Ms. Guthrie after meeting her at one such class in 1987. It was her den where the friends watched their Sunday services.
In 1988, Mr. Guthrie died of a heart attack, what Savannah Guthrie called a “stark dividing line” in the family’s story. She was 16 at the time.
Nancy Guthrie had never worked full time outside the home, but she landed a job at a small business newspaper, The Daily Territorial, eventually parlaying it into a career at the University of Arizona, which Savannah Guthrie attended, spending college close to home.
In the 1980s, Nancy Guthrie also brought her own mother and her older brother, Pierce, who had Down syndrome, into a guesthouse on her property.
Ms. Burnson, 66, a retired teacher who has known Ms. Guthrie for more than half of her life, recalls how Ms. Guthrie came to her home one night in 1996 after Ms. Burnson’s husband died. Ms. Guthrie told Ms. Burnson to sit on her lap and consoled her.
Colleagues who knew Ms. Guthrie from her time at the University of Arizona said she was a skilled communicator who never chased publicity. When funding cuts threatened to shut down a poison-information center in the mid-1990s, she plunged into a campaign to gather 20,000 signatures and urge Arizona politicians to save it, according to Jacqueline Sharkey, a former colleague who organized the effort. It succeeded.
Ms. Guthrie left her job at the University of Arizona in 2007, and spent several years afterward serving on an advisory committee for the journalism school. Dave Cuillier, a former director of that school, said that Ms. Guthrie kept him “in check.”
“She was quick to correct me,” Mr. Cuillier said. “She was just one of those people who you really appreciated getting to work with.”
For much of her time in Arizona, she embraced the outdoors — playing tennis, hiking and joining spin classes. She enjoyed cooking for friends and eating out, and would sometimes see movies at an art house cinema.
But as she aged, things became more difficult. She told one friend, Kris Federhar, that she no longer felt comfortable going to a movie theater up a flight of stairs, only half-jokingly referring to it as a fire trap. She had a pacemaker and relied on daily medication, and she began using a cane and powerful hearing aids. In recent years, she often stayed at home, where she kept the windows open in the summer, wrote in her journal on her patio, played Wordle and read books that publishers had sent to Savannah.
But she was still sharp, friends said, and rarely complained about her back pain or other problems. And she still had a buzzing social life, never missing a monthly book club meeting.
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Ms. Guthrie with her youngest child, Savannah, a co-host of “Today,” NBC’s long-running morning show.Credit…via NBC
On Jan. 26, the day before her birthday, Ms. Federhar dropped off a balloon and treats on her doorstep. The next day, Ms. Burnson, who has family roots in New Orleans, set out some nice crystal, cooked shrimp and grits and made beignets.
At the mahjong game two days before her disappearance, Ms. Guthrie was dressed casually on a chilly day, laughing with her friends and, as usual, playing strategically.
The next evening, Ms. Guthrie had dinner and played games with her daughter Annie and her son-in-law Tommaso Cioni at their home before Mr. Cioni drove her back to her house.
Hours later, her doorbell camera captured the masked man at her door.
Messages Ms. Guthrie appears to have posted on the neighborhood app Nextdoor in recent years showed that she was keenly interested in the desert, and wondered whether javelinas would eat her periwinkle.
She wrote four years ago that she was interested in buying a doorbell camera and asked about the best brand. She did not indicate she was concerned for her safety. She said she just wanted to see what animals might wander by at night.
Feb. 10, 2026
The New York Times
A timeline of Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance.
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The authorities in Pima County, Ariz., have repeatedly closed and reopened the crime scene at Nancy Guthrie’s house near Tucson since she was reported missing on Feb. 1.Credit…Rebecca Noble/Reuters
For more than two weeks, the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, has confounded the authorities. And because it involves the possible abduction of a celebrity’s relative, it has captivated much of the nation.
In the latest developments, the F.B.I. said that gloves found about two miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home had an unknown man’s DNA on them, and that it would put the DNA profile into a database in an effort to identify the person.
The F.B.I. said that the gloves appeared to match those worn by the man who was captured on Ms. Guthrie’s doorbell camera on the night she was abducted.
Black-and-white surveillance video and images from Ms. Guthrie’s doorstep showed a person wearing a ski mask, gloves and a backpack early on the morning of Feb. 1.
Here is a timeline of the major developments in the case.
9:48 p.m., Jan 31.
Nancy Guthrie Is Last Seen
Just after 5:30 p.m., Ms. Guthrie took an Uber to the nearby home of her older daughter, Annie, and her son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni. The three spent about four hours together before Mr. Cioni drove her home.
Ms. Guthrie’s garage door opened at 9:48 p.m. and closed two minutes later, according to the authorities.
Mr. Cioni watched to make sure Ms. Guthrie made it safely inside. That was the last time anyone in her family saw or heard from her.
1:47-2:28 a.m., Feb. 1
Ms. Guthrie’s Front Door Camera Is Disconnected
Ms. Guthrie’s front door camera was disconnected at 1:47 a.m. About 25 minutes later, a camera somewhere on her property detected motion, but recorded no video, because she did not have a subscription to the device’s service provider.
At 2:28 a.m., about 15 minutes after the camera was set off, Ms. Guthrie’s pacemaker lost contact with her cellphone, which investigators would later find inside the house, suggesting this may have been about the time she was taken.
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Chris Nanos, the Pima County sheriff, said that his deputies saw “something at the home that didn’t sit well,” and that it became clear that Ms. Guthrie had been forced out against her will.Credit…Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images
Feb. 1, morning
Ms. Guthrie Is Reported Missing
When Ms. Guthrie did not arrive at a friend’s house to watch a live-streamed church service on Sunday, the friend notified Ms Guthrie’s family. Family members went to her house just before noon to check on her, discovered she was missing and called 911.
The authorities found her phone, wallet, hearing aid, daily medication and car. At her front stoop, they found an empty mount where a doorbell camera had once hung, and on the tile below they saw spatters of blood, which DNA analysis later confirmed to be Ms. Guthrie’s.
Sheriff Chris Nanos of Pima County, Ariz., told The New York Times that investigators found even more worrying signs of violence at Ms. Guthrie’s home.
“There were things at that home that were of concern,” he said. “That scene, there were things that, I thought, this doesn’t sit well.”
He declined to elaborate, but investigators spent the following days combing through the home, its garage and the surrounding scrubland.
Feb. 2
A Ransom Note Arrives
Roughly 24 hours after the sheriff’s department first posted a missing-person bulletin for Ms. Guthrie, a Tucson television station, KOLD, received a note claiming to be from her kidnapper. The station forwarded it to the authorities.
The celebrity gossip site TMZ, which received a copy the next morning, reported that the letter demanded millions of dollars in Bitcoin for the release of Ms. Guthrie.
Harvey Levin, the outlet’s founder, described the letter on a broadcast as “very well constructed.”
Feb. 3
Savannah Guthrie Withdraws From NBC’s Olympics Coverage
NBC Sports said Savannah Guthrie would not be part of the network’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in Italy. Mary Carillo took her place alongside Terry Gannon as a host of the network’s coverage of the opening ceremony on Friday.
Savannah Guthrie also has been absent from the “Today” set to be in Tucson with her family.
Hoda Kotb, her co-anchor on “Today” from 2018 until 2025, returned to the show to fill in for her former colleague.
Feb. 4
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The “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, flanked by her siblings, Annie and Camron, said in an emotional video that she wanted to hear directly from anyone who may have taken her mother.Credit…Savannah Guthrie, via Instagram/UGC, via, via Reuters
Ms. Guthrie’s Children Plead for Her Safe Return
Ms. Guthrie’s children recorded their first emotional address to their mother’s kidnapper and posted it to Savannah Guthrie’s Instagram account. Savannah Guthrie, trying to hold back tears as she read from a paper, said her family had heard about purported ransom letters that had been sent to news organizations.
She said that they wanted to hear directly from anyone who may have taken their mother, but that they first needed proof she was alive.
“We are ready to talk,” she said, flanked by her older siblings, Annie and Camron Guthrie. “However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know, without a doubt, that she is alive, and that you have her.”
Feb. 6
Another Note and Another Video
KOLD received another message from the supposed kidnappers. The message, which the station forwarded to the police and did not describe publicly, came from a different IP address than the ransom note, but the senders appeared to have used the same methods to mask their location and identity, the station said.
The next day, the Guthrie siblings released another video. It was 20 seconds long and cryptic.
Savannah Guthrie, speaking without a visible script, said into the camera: “We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace.”
Feb. 9
Savannah Guthrie Says Her Family Is at ‘An Hour of Desperation’
As the search entered its second week, Savannah Guthrie implored the public for help in finding her mother, saying in an Instagram video that she and her siblings believed that she was “still out there.”
“We are at an hour of desperation,” she said.
Feb. 10
Surveillance Images Show a Masked Figure
New images and videos released showed a masked, armed person at Nancy Guthrie’s doorstep on the night she was abducted, the first significant break in the investigation.
The black-and-white footage, released by the F.B.I. and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, depicts a person wearing a ski mask, gloves, a backpack and what appears to be a holstered handgun outside Ms. Guthrie’s home, just north of Tucson.
Late in the day, the authorities detained a man for questioning in the case but released him early on Feb. 11.
Feb. 13
Officers Investigate a Residence Near Ms. Guthrie’s Home
The police blocked off a street and investigated a residence a short drive from both Nancy Guthrie’s home and the home of her older daughter and son-in-law, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said.
Several law-enforcement vehicles were seen at the residence, including a sheriff’s department forensics team truck.
Sheriff Nanos said investigators had obtained DNA from Ms. Guthrie’s property. A department statement said the DNA did not belong to anyone in close contact with Ms. Guthrie.
Feb. 14
Investigators Focus on a Range Rover
Not long after midnight on Saturday, deputies and F.B.I. investigators converged on a Culver’s parking lot and focused on a gray Range Rover.
The location was about a five-minute drive away from the residential neighborhood they sealed off a few hours earlier, although it was unclear if the activity was related to the Guthrie case.
Investigators photographed the Range Rover inside and out and unfurled a sheet to shield it from view. A tow truck later removed the vehicle.
Feb. 15
Unknown DNA Found in Gloves
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DNA Found on Gloves as Guthrie’s Daughter Makes New Plea
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The F.B.I. said gloves found near Nancy Guthrie’s home appeared to match the ones seen in doorbell camera footage.CreditCredit…Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
The F.B.I. said that gloves found about two miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home had an unknown man’s DNA on them, and that it would put the DNA profile into a database in an effort to identify the person.
The F.B.I. said that the gloves appeared to match those worn by the man who was captured on Ms. Guthrie’s doorbell camera on the night she was abducted.
The F.B.I. added that most of the other gloves recovered during its searches were those of investigators who had discarded them while conducting sweeps near the home.
Later in the day, in a new video posted online, Savannah Guthrie told whoever had abducted her mother that “it’s never too late to do the right thing,” making an emotional direct appeal at the two-week mark of her mother’s disappearance.
Feb. 16
Sheriff Clears the Family
In a statement, Sheriff Nanos said that all the Guthrie family members, including siblings and spouses, had been cleared of suspicion. “The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case,” he said.
