Savannah Guthrie was sitting across from Hoda Kotb when she said it. Two months had nearly passed since her mother vanished, and this was the first time the Today anchor had spoken publicly at length. She told Kotb she kept circling one thought. Whether Nancy was taken because of her. Her job. Her face on television five mornings a week. “If it is me,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Mommy.”
Craig Melvin watched the clip air on the Today set the next morning and called it the hardest part. Nobody on that set said what Savannah had just suggested might be true.
Nancy Guthrie is 84 years old. She was carried out of her own home in the early hours of February 1, and four months later she has not been found. No one has been arrested. Savannah still posts at night, asking whoever has her mother to send her back.
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Is Nancy Guthrie Still Missing?
Yes. Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home in the Catalina Foothills, a quiet area north of Tucson, Arizona, during the early hours of February 1, 2026. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI are both still working the case. As of June 2026, no suspect has been publicly identified.
The Guthrie family is offering $1 million for information that brings Nancy home. The FBI has posted a separate $100,000 reward for tips leading to an arrest and conviction. Anyone with information can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), anonymously if they choose.
The Night She Disappeared
Tommaso Cioni, Nancy’s son-in-law, drove her home from a family dinner on the evening of January 31 and watched the garage door close behind her. It was around 9:45 p.m. He left.
At 1:47 a.m., the doorbell camera at her front entrance went dead. Motion sensors picked up activity at the property about 25 minutes later. At 2:28 a.m., the app linked to Nancy’s pacemaker lost its connection to her phone. Investigators read that as the moment she was moved out of range. Her phone was still on the nightstand.
Nancy was not reported missing until the middle of the day on February 1, when a friend called the family after she failed to appear for an online church service. Relatives drove to the house, found her gone, and called the sheriff. Deputies arrived around 12:15 p.m.
Sheriff Chris Nanos told reporters that day there was no doubt about what they were dealing with. “We do, in fact, have a crime,” he said. He added that Nancy depended on daily heart medication and that going without it could kill her within a day.
What Investigators Found at the Scene
A NewsNation crew reached the property on February 4, after deputies had finished processing it and handed it back to the family. They found a trail of blood running from the mat at Nancy’s front door to the edge of the driveway. Testing confirmed it was hers.
The Ring doorbell camera had been taken off its mount and carried away. It was never recovered. Because the device was gone and Nancy had no cloud subscription, the FBI worked with Google to recover footage from backup servers. Deputies also found the back door propped open and signs of forced entry, with blood inside the house as well. The FBI later pulled a camera from the roof and towed a car out of the garage.
Former FBI profiler Jim Clemente studied photographs of the blood pattern for a Fox News interview in April. The drops fell straight down, he said, which told him Nancy was not moving fast when she bled. He believes she was struck in the face, with a fist or the butt of a gun, then carried face up toward the driveway, which is why the trail thinned out before it reached the pavement. He also read the scene as the work of one person. “It rules out more than one person,” Clemente said, “because if two people had control of her as they were leaving the house she would never have fallen to the ground.”
The Ransom Notes Went to the Press
Whoever took Nancy never reached out to her children.
The ransom notes went to KOLD, a Tucson CBS affiliate, and to TMZ. A second note arrived at KOLD two days later. They demanded four million dollars in Bitcoin by February 5, rising to six million if that deadline passed. Both deadlines came and went with no payment. The family learned what the kidnapper wanted the same way the rest of the country did, by watching the news.
Savannah and her siblings Annie and Camron answered with a video saying they would pay. They got nothing back. No proof their mother was alive.
Sources told TMZ that investigators believed the writer knew the local Tucson television scene, which pointed to someone with ties to the area. The notes also mentioned a specific broken floodlight at Nancy’s home, so the sender had been there or knew the property.
A California man, Derrick Callella, 42, was arrested and charged with sending the family a separate, fake ransom note. His case had nothing to do with the original demands.
The Suspect Is Still Unidentified
On February 10, FBI Director Kash Patel released photos and video pulled from the doorbell backups. They showed a masked figure at Nancy’s front door in the early hours of February 1, fiddling with the camera and then taking it.
Another image, captured on an earlier date, shows what may be the same man at her door without a backpack or a gun. Investigators asked neighbors to dig up footage from January 11 specifically, which suggests the suspect had come by the house weeks ahead of time. One neighbor told Fox News she had noticed a younger man walking the area about two weeks before Nancy vanished and flagged it to investigators afterward.
From the video, the FBI put out a description: a man between 5 feet 9 and 5 feet 10, average build, in a black mask and black gloves, carrying a 24-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack from Walmart, with a holstered pistol.
DNA from gloves left at the scene matched no one in the national database. Every member of the Guthrie family has been cleared.
How Savannah Has Carried the Search
Savannah pulled back from work the moment her mother went missing, including NBC’s coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics. Hoda Kotb, who had stepped away from Today in January 2025, came back to sit in her chair. The hosts started wearing yellow ribbon pins. The studio filled with yellow flowers.
Three days into the search, Savannah recorded a video with Annie and Camron and spoke straight to her mother. “Everyone is looking for you, mommy, everywhere,” she said. “We will not rest.” A week and a half later she posted again, this time to whoever was holding Nancy: “It is never too late to do the right thing.” By late February she was describing the search as agony, every hour spent worrying and aching and missing her mother.
Her first sit-down came in late March, a two-part interview with Kotb that aired on March 26 and 27. She talked about waking in the dark every night and picturing what Nancy was going through. “I imagine her terror,” she said. “It is unthinkable, but those thoughts demand to be thought.” Then she said the thing she had been holding onto: “If it is me, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Mommy.”
She came back to the Today desk on April 6.
On Mother’s Day, she shared a 44-second reel of old home videos and family photos. In one of them, Nancy looks into the camera and says, “Miss you.” Savannah’s caption read: “We will never stop looking for you. We will never be at peace until we find you. Someone knows something that can make the difference.”
Where the Case Stands in June 2026
The investigation is still open and still without a named suspect.
Sheriff Nanos told KOLD on June 1 that the FBI had been “involved in this case every single day.” Much of the wait, he said, came down to the labs. “What really makes it prolonged is we do rely on labs for the digital part of it.” When the search hit 100 days in May, he made clear his office was not backing off. “There’s way too much work to be done, that is ongoing, with some of the physical evidence we have. And we’re not going to give up on it just because it’s been 100 days.”
Around the same time, Pima County put out an alert for Coral Michelle Smith, 40, wanted in a kidnapping that happened on May 29 about 6.8 miles from Nancy’s home. Investigators said the two cases do not appear to be connected.
The people who study cases like this for a living do not agree on what happened. Jon Buehler, a retired Modesto Police Department detective, told NewsNation he doubts Nancy survived. He pointed to the blood, her age, the pacemaker, and the silence after the ransom notes. “The amount of blood that was present there in the front of the house suggests to me a wound that was bleeding a lot,” he said, “and with poor health and age on a pacemaker in fear, and him trying to get her to comply, that’s why I just don’t think she survived it.”
Jason Pack, a retired FBI agent, sees more reason for hope. “Four months is a long time to keep a secret, and people start to crack,” he told Parade. “They make calls they shouldn’t make. They spend money they can’t explain. They act nervous when there’s no reason to be nervous.”
On June 8, Savannah posted once more. A religious image, a line beneath it: “Oh my, my soul it cries out.” And under that, three words of her own: “Bring her home.”
Back in March, Savannah said out loud the thing her colleagues could not bring themselves to finish for her. Four months on, the question of whether her mother was taken because of who her daughter is has no answer. Savannah is still on television every morning, still posting every night, still using the only thing she has that might reach the person who took Nancy. The reward stands at more than a million dollars. The tip line is open. And somewhere, someone knows where an 84-year-old woman has been since the first of February.
Reward and tip information:
The Guthrie family is offering $1 million for information that leads to Nancy’s recovery. The FBI has posted a separate $100,000 reward for tips that result in an arrest and conviction. Nancy Guthrie is 84, has limited mobility, takes daily heart medication, and has a pacemaker.
Call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) to submit a tip, anonymously if needed. The Pima County Sheriff’s Office can be reached at 520-351-4900.
