Nancy Guthrie has been missing since Feb. 1, and in her first interview since her mother’s apparent abduction, Savannah Guthrie described evidence her family says suggested the case was not a woman simply wandering off. Guthrie said their family saw “the back doors” of Nancy Guthrie’s Arizona home propped open, alongside blood on the front doorstep and what she said was a camera that had been yanked off.
Guthrie told NBC’s “Today” that she and her siblings were already convinced something was wrong because of the pain their mother had been dealing with. She said that even before investigators or police could confirm a motive, the home’s condition and the missing items she described pushed the family toward the conclusion that Nancy Guthrie had been taken.
Guthrie said investigators released surveillance videos showing a masked man outside her mother’s front door in Tucson on the night she vanished. Guthrie said she found the images terrifying and recalled earlier “cruel speculation” suggesting a family member might have been involved, which she said she will never fully understand.
“So we were saying, ‘This is not OK’” Guthrie said, describing how her family responded once they had seen the scene. “‘Something is very wrong here.”
In the interview, Guthrie said her brother quickly concluded the circumstances pointed to kidnapping for ransom. She described the moment she was told and said she tried to reject the idea at first, asking, “Do you think because of me?” She recounted that her brother replied, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but, yeah, maybe.”
Guthrie said the family received purported ransom notes, and she described how some of them were fake while she believed two notes the family responded to were real. She said the experience was “surreal” and questioned how the family would be expected to communicate with a kidnapper who had taken an 84-year-old woman in what she described as the middle of the night, in her pajamas and without her medicine.
“How is it possible that we are having to make a video speaking to a kidnapper who took an 84-year-old woman in the dead of night, in her pajamas, with no shoes, without her medicine?” Guthrie asked.
Guthrie also said her public plea is focused on answers and on what she described as doing the right thing now. She said investigators “have worked tirelessly,” but that the family needs information that can bring her mother back, and she said they cannot be at peace without the truth. “We cannot be at peace without knowing and someone can do the right thing,” Guthrie said. “It is never too late to do the right thing and our hearts are focused on that.”