Nancy Guthrie missed her virtual church service on the morning of February 1. The people who know Nancy know that doesn't happen. At 84, she's the kind of person who shows up — for church, for family dinners, for everything. The night before, her son-in-law Tommaso Cioni had driven her home from dinner at her daughter Annie's house, dropping her at the front door of her Catalina Foothills home at about 9:50 p.m. By morning, she was gone. Blood on the porch. Signs of forced entry. And silence.
Who's Who?
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NGNancy Guthrie — Widowed at 46, raised three kids alone, disappeared from her own front porch at 84.
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Savannah Guthrie — Walked away from the Olympics opening ceremony and didn't come back for two months. -
AGAnnie Guthrie — A poet who had dinner with her mother the night Nancy vanished.
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CGCamron Guthrie — Spent 26 years flying F-16s, then stood before cameras begging for his mother's life.
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Michael Feldman — Once ran logistics for a vice president — now managing a family crisis with no playbook. -
TCTommaso Cioni — Dropped his mother-in-law at her front door at 9:50 p.m. She was gone by morning.
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CNChris Nanos — Fifty years in law enforcement, eight suspensions, and now a crime scene called corrupted.
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Richard Carmona — Former SWAT leader for the same department he's now accusing of incompetence.
The FBI released doorbell camera footage ten days later. It shows an armed man in a mask on Nancy's porch — about 5'9", average build, wearing an Ozark Trail backpack. A second image suggests the same person had been there before, on an earlier date. Someone had also cut the internet to Nancy's neighborhood that night. Ring cameras on nearby homes went dark. Investigators found a damaged utility box. This wasn't impulsive. Whoever took Nancy had planned it.
Nancy was born Nancy Ellen Long in Fort Wright, Kentucky, in 1942. She's lived in the Tucson area for more than fifty years. She was widowed in 1988 when her husband Charles died of a heart attack during a mining trip in Mexico. She raised three children — Annie, Camron, and Savannah — largely on her own. She lives with chronic pain and depends on daily medication. She has been without it for sixty-eight days.
Savannah Guthrie, Nancy's youngest, is the co-anchor of NBC's Today show. She was supposed to co-host the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina. She pulled out. Mary Carillo replaced her. Savannah took a two-month leave and went home. On February 4, she appeared in a video with Annie and Camron, speaking directly to whoever took their mother. "She lives in constant pain," Savannah said. "She is without any medicine. She needs it to survive, and she needs it not to suffer." On February 24, the family put up a million dollars. On March 26, Savannah sat down with Hoda Kotb. "We are in agony," she said. "It is unbearable." She returned to the Today desk on April 6. "It is good to be home," she told viewers. The reward is still unclaimed.
Annie Guthrie, the eldest, is a poet and jeweler who lives near her mother in Tucson. She published a poetry collection called The Good Dark. She had dinner with Nancy on the night of January 31 — the last family meal before everything changed. Her husband Tommaso, an Italian-born biology teacher at BASIS Oro Valley School, was the last person known to have seen Nancy alive. Camron, the middle child, is a retired F-16 pilot who spent 26 years with the Vermont Air National Guard's Green Mountain Boys. He stood between his sisters in that February video. Savannah's husband, Michael Feldman — a founding partner of The Glover Park Group and a former traveling chief of staff to Al Gore — has two young children with Savannah, Vale and Charley. There are a lot of people waiting for a phone call that hasn't come.
The ransom notes started showing up on February 3. Multiple notes demanding millions in bitcoin were sent to media outlets, including TMZ. One claimed Nancy had been taken across the border to Sonora, Mexico. The FBI is tracing the bitcoin transactions. A delivery driver named Carlos Palazuelos was detained in Rio Rico, Arizona, questioned for eight hours on February 10, and released without charges. Sheriff Chris Nanos told reporters in February that he believed Nancy was abducted and that "right now, we believe Nancy is still out there." That was the last reassuring thing anyone in charge has said.
The investigation itself is now under investigation. Richard Carmona — the former U.S. Surgeon General under George W. Bush, a combat-decorated Vietnam veteran, and a former SWAT team leader for the Pima County Sheriff's Department — went public on March 30 and said the crime scene had been "corrupted." Sheriff Nanos, who has fifty years in law enforcement and was suspended eight times early in his career including for excessive force, is accused of personally reopening the crime scene too soon. On April 7, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to demand a sworn report from Nanos by April 21. If he doesn't deliver, they'll move to remove him from office.
It is Day 68. Nancy Guthrie is still missing. The armed man from the doorbell footage has not been identified. The ransom notes have not led anywhere. The million-dollar reward sits unclaimed. And Savannah Guthrie is back on morning television, doing the thing she told Hoda she wasn't sure she could do: "I can't come back and try to be something that I'm not. But I can't not come back because it's my family." She meant her Today family. She meant all of them.