Listen to this article
Estimated 4 minutes
The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.
Investigators in Arizona want residents near Nancy Guthrie’s home to share surveillance camera footage of suspicious cars or people they may have noticed in the month before she disappeared.
The alert went across a three-kilometre radius in neighbourhoods close to where the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie went missing 12 days ago, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said Thursday.
It asked for video of “anything neighbours deem out of the ordinary or important to our investigation” since the beginning of January.
Federal and local officers have been going door-to-door in Tucson neighbourhoods around 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie’s house while also looking for clues around her other daughter’s nearby home, which she had visited just hours before disappearing.
Investigators have recovered and are analyzing several pieces of evidence, including a pair of gloves, the sheriff’s department said.
Reward for information increased
Authorities on Thursday briefly put up a tent in front of Nancy Guthrie’s entryway where her blood was discovered in the early days of the investigation, and where a doorbell camera captured images of a masked person the night she went missing. The FBI released descriptors of that person Thursday, whom it now calls a suspect, in a post on X.
The post describes the suspect as a 5-foot-9-inch or 5-foot-10-inch male with an average build, and included photos from multiple angles of a black, 25-litre “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack, which the agency said is the brand and model the suspect was wearing.
“We hope this updated description will help concentrate the public tips we are receiving,” the FBI said, noting it has received thousands of tips since Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance.
FBI Phoenix also announced it has hiked its reward to $100,000 US for information on Guthrie’s disappearance.
In two videos released by the FBI on Tuesday, a masked person who looks to be armed appears to tamper with the doorbell camera at the home of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie who is presumed to have been abducted about 10 days ago. FBI director Kash Patel wrote in an X post accompanying the footage that it was taken the morning of her disappearance.
Authorities have said Guthrie was taken against her will. She’s been missing since Feb. 1, and authorities say she takes several medications and there’s concern she could die without them.
While much of the nation remains engrossed by the mysterious disappearance, Savannah Guthrie on Thursday shared on Instagram a vintage home video of her mom with two children, sharing pink flowers. “We will never give up on her. Thank you for your prayers and hope,” she wrote.
On Wednesday, FBI agents carrying water bottles to beat the desert heat walked among rocks and vegetation at Nancy Guthrie’s home. They also fanned out across a nearby neighbourhood, knocking on doors and searching through brush and boulders.
“They were just asking some general questions, wondering if there was anything, any information we could shed on the Nancy Guthrie issue. Wanted to look around the property and after that, cameras and such,” Ann Adams, a neighbour of Nancy Guthrie’s oldest daughter, Annie Guthrie, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
“They did ask specifically for the 31st of January and the morning of the first of February, and then they wanted to know if we saw anything suspicious on cameras since then,” Adams said.
Two investigators emerged from daughter Annie Guthrie’s home Wednesday with a paper grocery sack and a white trash bag. One, still wearing blue protective gloves, also took a stack of mail from the roadside mailbox.
Adams said she was out walking her dog earlier this week when, “it started to get really busy and then I heard about them searching, looked down the street, I saw them slowly moving this way.”
Savannah Guthrie and her two siblings have indicated a willingness to pay a ransom. But it’s not known whether ransom notes demanding money with deadlines that have already passed were authentic.
