The 84-year-old mother of NBC Today anchor Savannah Guthrie has been missing from her Tucson home since February 1, 2026. The investigation is now in its fifth month.
Nancy Guthrie’s daily medication was on the kitchen counter when her family arrived at her Tucson home on the afternoon of February 1, 2026. Her phone was there too, along with her wallet and her car keys. The house was in order. What they did not find was Nancy.
She is still missing. No arrest has been made, no suspect has been publicly named, and the $1 million reward her family offered in February has gone unclaimed. Investigators believe Nancy was taken from her home in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills in the early hours of February 1, 2026, and they have not located her since.
On June 1, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos sat down with KOLD News 13 and described his investigation. “It moves at a snail’s pace, I guess for some,” he said. “But for my investigative team, and for me, we look at this as, no, this is doing exactly what we need it to do.” He did not mention that two months before that interview, the FBI had been waiting to test hair evidence from the crime scene that his department had sent to a private laboratory in Florida.
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Who is Nancy Guthrie?
Nancy Ellen Guthrie was born on January 27, 1942, in Fort Wright, Kentucky. She moved to Tucson in the early 1970s and had lived in the Catalina Foothills for more than 50 years. She has three children: Savannah, who has co-anchored NBC’s Today show since 2012; Annie; and Camron. At 84, she has limited mobility, a pacemaker, and takes daily medication for a chronic condition. She was active at St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church and had planned to join a Sunday morning livestream service on the day she was reported missing.
The night she disappeared
Nancy spent the evening of Saturday, January 31, at her daughter Annie’s home for dinner. Her son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, drove her back to the Catalina Foothills afterward. He dropped her off at about 9:48 p.m., watched the garage door close, and drove away. Cioni is the last person confirmed to have seen her.
What happened next was captured in fragments by the technology around her. At 1:47 a.m. on February 1, a masked and gloved figure disconnected her Nest doorbell camera from outside the house. Motion was detected at the property at 2:12 a.m. By 2:28 a.m., her bedside pacemaker monitor missed its scheduled transmission, which investigators read as the moment she was carried beyond range of her phone. Forty-one minutes separate the first event from the last. That is the span in which authorities believe she was taken.
By late Sunday morning, a member of her church called the Guthrie family after Nancy failed to appear for the livestream she had planned to join. Relatives reached the house at 11:56 a.m. and found nothing out of place inside. The family called 911 at 12:03 p.m. Deputies arrived 12 minutes later. Nancy needs her medication every day, and it sat untouched where she had left it.
What investigators found
Sheriff Chris Nanos said within a day that he believed Nancy had been abducted. Blood drops were found at the scene, running from the front door down the pathway toward the driveway, and DNA testing confirmed the blood was hers. In May 2026, retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente, who spent 22 years in the bureau, studied the spatter pattern and told Fox News Digital that Nancy was alive when she was forced from her home.
The footage from her doorbell camera nearly never existed. Nancy had no cloud subscription for the Nest device, and the camera itself went missing from the scene. The FBI worked with Google to pull residual data from the company’s backend servers, and recovered grainy video. It showed a man in a ski mask at the front door. He placed a gloved hand over the lens, then stepped off the porch, picked up a piece of garden shrubbery, and held it up to block the camera.
The FBI later identified that man as the suspect in Nancy’s kidnapping. Forensic analysis put him at roughly 5 feet 9 to 5 feet 10 inches tall, average build. He carried a black 25-litre Ozark Trail Hiker Pack, a backpack sold only at Walmart. A gun holster sat at an awkward angle on his body. As he reached toward the lens, footage appears to show a tattoo on the underside of his right wrist. A second FBI photograph, taken on a different day, shows the same man at the property without his backpack, which led investigators to conclude he had visited the home more than once before February 1.
Two neighbors had noticed something in the weeks before. Brett McIntire, who lives across the street, told the New York Post he had seen a full-sized white van with no markings parked on the street in the days beforehand and reported it to police. Aldine Meister, who has lived in the Catalina Foothills for 30 years, told Fox News Digital she saw a young man walking near the intersection that leads to Nancy’s street about two weeks earlier. He was not dressed for a walk, she said, and had his hat pulled low over his eyes.
The ransom notes
On February 2, KOLD-TV, the CBS affiliate in Tucson, received a letter through its tip portal demanding payment for Nancy’s release. The letter included specific details about what she had been wearing on the night she vanished. The FBI reviewed it and shared it with investigators but would not say whether it came from someone holding her.
Over the following days, TMZ founder Harvey Levin said he had received notes claiming Nancy was alive but frightened. A reported demand of $6 million in Bitcoin carried a deadline of 5:00 p.m. on February 9, which passed with no confirmed exchange.
On February 5, the FBI arrested Derrick Callella, 42, of Hawthorne, California, after he texted two of Nancy’s family members posing as her abductor. He had found the family’s contact information online and told investigators he was trying to see whether they would respond. He was released on a $20,000 bond, and his messages were not connected to the KOLD-TV letter. Former FBI agents who reviewed the case told reporters that sending ransom demands through newsrooms, rather than to the family or police, is rare in real kidnapping cases.
Three forensic threads
The strongest physical evidence in the case has so far led investigators in three directions, two of which have stalled.
A glove recovered about 2 miles from Nancy’s home appeared to match the ones worn by the man in the doorbell footage. DNA from an unknown male was pulled from it and run through CODIS, the FBI’s national database of more than 19 million offender profiles, with no match. The glove was eventually traced to a local restaurant worker who had no connection to the case.
A mixed DNA sample taken from inside the home did not belong to Nancy, her family, or anyone known to have had access to the house. The Sheriff’s department sent it to a private laboratory in Florida, which reported difficulty separating the sample. Nanos told NBC News a usable result could take as long as a year.
The hair found at the scene became the most contested piece of evidence in the investigation. It was sent to that same Florida lab rather than directly to the FBI. In April 2026, FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs Ben Williamson wrote on X that the bureau had asked for the material two months earlier. The hair has since been moved to the FBI laboratory. CeCe Moore, chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs and a central figure in the Gilgo Beach conviction, told NewsNation that a sequencing technique developed by Dr. Ed Green can now extract usable DNA from a rootless hair. “Hair absolutely can make the case solvable,” she said. A result, she added, would take months.
The investigation’s fault lines
Every forensic expert who has reviewed the evidence has reached a version of the same conclusion: the man who took Nancy Guthrie was not a careful one. He blocked a security camera with a shrub because he had not prepared for it. He wore his holster wrong. He may have shed biological evidence at the scene. He returned to the property more than once without grasping that the camera was recording him each time.
Clemente called him “sort of bumbling his way through this.” Retired detective Jon Buehler told NewsNation he believes one person acted alone, partly because the $1 million reward would be a heavy thing to keep an accomplice quiet about. Buehler also said the amount of blood at the scene, set against Nancy’s age and health, leaves him fearing she did not survive.
The agencies working the case have not always pulled together. FBI Director Kash Patel said in June 2026 that the bureau offered help the day Nancy was reported missing and pressed claims that it was brought in late. A senior FBI source described the early handling to Fox News Digital as “insane.” Nanos has said the FBI was involved “every single day.” What is on the record is plain enough: the Sheriff’s office sent key DNA to a private lab the FBI had already asked for, and the bureau’s own spokesman confirmed the two-month delay in public, on X, while Nancy was still missing.
Where the case stands now
The Guthrie family announced the $1 million reward on February 24 and donated $500,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children the same week. Savannah Guthrie returned to the Today anchor desk on April 6 after two months away. On June 8, during an on-air conversation on Today with Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones, she described what going back to work while her mother is still missing has been like. “It’s always with me,” she said. “I cry every morning on the way to work, and I cry every morning on the way home.” She added: “We can hold our sadness and we can hold our joy. And if you don’t believe it, just watch me. I’m gonna show you.”
On June 13, a Mexican volunteer search group called Buscando Corazones Nogales conducted an independent search near the US-Mexico border after receiving an anonymous tip about the location of Nancy’s remains. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department posted on social media that it was aware of the reports but had not been contacted by Mexican authorities and had no evidence to verify the claim. Mexican authorities stated separately there was no basis for a search near the city of Nogales.
Also on June 13, former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer posted on X that blockchain security firm CertiK had officially designated the abduction as a “wrench attack,” a cybersecurity term for physical coercion used to gain access to someone’s cryptocurrency holdings, which connects directly to the Bitcoin ransom demands sent to media outlets in February. Coffindaffer called the designation a “huge breakthrough.” Law enforcement has not confirmed it.
Anyone with information can contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov.
The hair sits at the FBI laboratory. The reward is unclaimed. The man who covered a camera with a garden shrub on the night of February 1 has no name in the case file. Nancy Guthrie has now been gone for 133 days, and the question her family has been asking since that first afternoon, when her medication was still on the counter, has no answer yet.
