The Arizona sheriff leading the search for Nancy Guthrie, mother of “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie, is confident his investigators are making progress more than a month after her disappearance
In an interview on Monday with NBC News correspondent Liz Kreutz, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said he believes officers “are definitely closer” to locating the suspect or suspects behind 83-year-old Guthrie’s abduction than ever before.
“We’ve got a lot of intel, a lot of leads,” he continued, “but now it’s time to just go to work.”
Nanos added that the sheriff’s department now has a dedicated team from their homicide unit working with the FBI on the case, and everyone involved is operating under the assumption that Guthrie is still alive.
Authorities have so far struggled to identify a suspect in wake of Guthrie’s disappearance on the night of January 31. Her children have since offered a $1 million reward for any information that leads to her recovery or the arrest of a suspect.
Authorities believe Savannah’s sister, Annie Guthrie, was the last person to see their mother prior to her disappearance. She said they went out to dinner with her husband, Tommaso Cioni, then dropped her back home in Tucson between 9:30 and 9:45 p.m. Concern for the Guthrie matriarch began to swirl the following day, after she failed to show up for church and she was reported missing around noon.
During a subsequent search of her home, investigators discovered Guthrie’s blood in the doorway, while all of her personal belongings — including her wallet, cellphone and car — were still on the scene.
AP; FBI
A shadowy figure was caught on doorbell camera footage (inset) the night Guthrie went missing from her Tucson home. (AP; FBI)
Last month, authorities released doorbell camera footage that sees a masked intruder outside Guthrie’s home. The FBI’s Phoenix bureau has described him as a male with an average build, standing between 5-feet-9 and 5-feet-10. He was also wearing, a ski mask, gloves a holster and a 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Backpack, which authorities initially suspected was purchased at a Walmart.
“We’ve now learned that maybe it wasn’t purchased out of Walmart,” Nanos said on Monday. “That backpack is new, it’s exclusive to Walmart, but who’s to say I didn’t buy it and put it on eBay? That’s what we’re looking into.”
TMZ has also received a series of ransom notes in the weeks since Guthrie’s went missing, the most recent of them requesting $6 million in cryptocurrency in exchange for her return. The outlet said it forwarded the information to the FBI and declined to release additional details.
