Seven months into a search that appears to have stalled, “Today” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie spoke about her missing mother, Nancy Guthrie, in the past tense on the show’s September 10, 2026, broadcast.
The moment arrived in the middle of a cheerful stretch of the show. Moments earlier, the hosts had told viewers that the crew would be shooting a live episode in County Kerry, Ireland, and Guthrie brought up her own family.
“My mother’s family w-, my mother was Irish, her grandmother,” Guthrie said. “They were from Galway.”
The rest of the hosts fell quiet. Seated between co-hosts Al Roker and Craig Melvin, the rest of the morning show crew around her, Guthrie held on to her smile and her energy, then handed the conversation to fellow host Carson Daly: “You have some Irish, right?”
Viewers caught the tense. According to a source close to “Today” and to Guthrie, the past-tense phrasing was not an acknowledgment that Nancy Guthrie had died.
Missing Since February 1
Nancy Guthrie, 84, who lived alone north of Tucson, Arizona, did not join a virtual church service, and relatives reported her missing around noon on February 1. The last time anyone saw her was the evening before, when her son-in-law dropped her home after dinner at her daughter Annie Guthrie’s home. Inside the house, investigators found blood matching her DNA, and a surveillance video from the morning she vanished showed a masked, armed person on her porch. More than a week after the disappearance, the FBI put out footage from a camera at her front door in which a masked stranger appears. Investigators also located blood on the porch.
Someone had taken her, possibly in the middle of the night, the Pima County Sheriff’s Office said, and the agency was treating kidnapping or abduction as possibilities. Investigators had not identified a suspect or a person of interest, the office said in a February 4 statement. Authorities said they had no credible information suggesting a possible abduction was a targeted incident. Investigators reportedly weighed using genealogy databases to search DNA evidence, and they pursued backpack leads with Walmart.
Volunteers and search crews spent the weeks after she vanished pushing through desert terrain thick with cacti, bushes and boulders. Another group combed the area near the Arizona-Mexico border and reported no sign of her.
Two Notes and a Deadline
Savannah Guthrie posted a 20-second video on February 7, sitting alongside her brother, Camron Guthrie, and her sister, Annie Guthrie, and holding her siblings’ hands. A message had come to the family, she said in the clip, as she begged for her mother to be returned and promised that the family would pay.
At least three news organizations received a possible ransom note. No law enforcement agency had substantiated it.
Tucson television station KOLD got two notes. The first arrived through the station’s news tips system on February 2, and the second landed just before noon on February 6, KOLD news director Jessica Bobula told NBC News. The first set out two deadlines, asked for funds and indicated Guthrie could be harmed, she said. Whoever wrote the second demanded no money and diverged from the first in nearly every respect, she said, though the author appeared to be trying to establish that both messages came from the same sender. The station handed both notes to the sheriff’s office, along with the IP information.
Once the notes became public, KOLD said two had reached it — one demanding millions in Bitcoin in exchange for Guthrie’s return, the other saying she had died. Her abductors never intended for her to die, according to one of the notes, though her death came soon after she vanished, law enforcement sources said.
At the “Today” desk in New York, a tissue in her left hand, Savannah Guthrie declined to weigh in on NBC News’ coverage of the case and instead turned the moment into an appeal, urging anyone with information to speak to investigators. Her family was in agony and would never stop looking for her mother, she said. The sheriff’s office referred questions about the notes to the FBI.
Where the Search Stands
Actress Allison Janney won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for “The Diplomat” at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards on September 14, and reporters in the press room asked her about her concern for Guthrie. “I honestly can say I think about her every day and think about the loss and what Savannah and her family are going through. It truly just took over. I don’t think I’m alone too. I think all of America was thinking about her,” she said.
On the September 15 broadcast of “Today,” Guthrie answered with a renewed public appeal for information about her mother. “I never let a moment pass, if I get one, to talk about my mom and how much we miss her and love her, my whole family, my sister, and my brother, and I and all of our extended families, we’re in such pain. We need help. So thank you, Allison Janney, for remembering us and for giving an opportunity for me to renew that call,” she said on air. She added: “We just want our mom home, give her a proper goodbye. That’s all.”
Guest co-host Willie Geist had highlighted Janney’s remarks on the same broadcast, calling them a “beautiful expression of sympathy,” and Roker said the actress “speaks for almost everybody out there in America.” Guthrie said of Janney: “Yeah, I was so touched to see her do that.”
More than two months after her mother disappeared, Guthrie returned to the “Today” anchor desk on April 6, and has addressed the case only rarely in the months since. The public, she has asked, should join their prayers to the family’s, and she has said her mother might be in heaven, dancing with her father.
In an August Instagram message addressed to her mother’s kidnappers, she wrote that her family wakes up each day and tries to be strong and go on, because their joyful and resilient mother taught them to do exactly that. “But make no mistake — our hearts are in ruins,” she wrote.
Remains discovered near Nancy Guthrie’s home were reported to have no connection to the case “at this time.”
The sheriff’s office calls the investigation active and ongoing and says it is working with the FBI. In a statement on September 10, the office said labs around the country continue to support DNA and video analysis, that advances in technology are aiding the work, and that tips keep coming in and are being reviewed. The family has put up a $1 million reward for tips that lead to Nancy Guthrie’s “miracle” return.
As of September 15, the tip lines publicized in the case are 1-800-CALL-FBI, 520-351-4900 and 88-CRIME, along with the FBI tip site.
