The last time anyone saw 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, she was being helped out of a car by her son-in-law, carefully making her way back into the tidy desert home she has lived in for half a century. It was just before 10 p.m. on a quiet January night in the Catalina Foothills, the well-heeled community that sprawls across the slopes north of Tucson. She had eaten dinner with family, laughed with her daughter, and been driven home as usual.
Police say Guthrie, mother ofTodayshow anchor Savannah Guthrie, appears to have been snatched from her home in the dead of night and forced into a car. Her blood was reportedly found outside the property; the door showed signs of forced entry. Her phone, her car and even her smartwatch were left behind.
In a case already riddled with chilling detail, one datapoint has quietly become central: the2 a.m. 'abduction window' suggested by her pacemaker.
Guthrie, described by investigators as 'sharp as a tack' but with mobility issues, had been dropped off at around 9.45 p.m. on 31 January by her son-in-law, 50-year-old Tommaso Cioni. She had spent the evening with Cioni and her other daughter, 56-year-old Annie—Savannah's sister. There was nothing to suggest what was coming.
The alarm was first raised not by police, but by the quiet regularity of Guthrie's own life. When she failed to appear at her usual Sunday morning church service, a worried friend contacted her children. They, in turn, called law enforcement. By then, crucial hours had already slipped away.
At Guthrie's roughly $1 million home—bought with her late husband in 1975 for just $85,000—officers from the Pima County Sheriff's Department walked into what they swiftly declared a crime scene. Her car was in the drive. Her phone and smartwatch were inside. Outside, there were what appeared to beblood droplets. Doors and access points reportedly showed evidence of forced entry.
The detail that most rattled investigators came from inside her body. According to authorities, Guthrie's smartwatch stopped syncing its data with her pacemaker at about 2 a.m. on 1 February. It is not definitive proof of the exact moment she was taken, but it is close enough to serve as a grim marker: sometime between late evening and that 2 a.m. cut-off, something violent and deliberate seems to have unfolded in that house.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has been blunt about the stakes. Guthrie needs daily medication, he has stressed, and whoever removed her from that home may have no idea how vital it is.
'You've placed her in great jeopardy without giving her meds that are critical to her,' he said. 'Again, like I've said, could be fatal if she doesn't get those meds.'
The case might have remained a local horror if not for the name of the missing woman's eldest daughter. Savannah Guthrie—one of the most recognisable faces on American breakfast television, with an estimated net worth of $40 million—has abruptly stepped back from herTodayhosting duties to focus entirely on the search.
Source: International Business Times UK
