The Sheriff Said He Had No Note Saying Nancy Guthrie Was Dead. A Day Later His Office Released One.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told CBS News he had no body, no burial site and no note. The next day his department published two ransom letters — the second of which says the 84-year-old died shortly after she was taken.
Six months after Nancy Guthrie vanished from her home outside Tucson, the sheriff leading the search told CBS News he had nothing suggesting the 84-year-old was dead. "I have nothing to indicate she's dead. I don't have a body. I don't have a burial site. I don't have any note," Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said Thursday. The next day, his own department released a note that said precisely that.
The two documents made public Friday were emailed to KOLD-TV, the CBS affiliate in Tucson, in the days after Guthrie — the mother of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie — was taken from her home in February. The first arrived the day after the abduction. "Hello Savannah, we have your mother," it began. It demanded $4 million in bitcoin and promised she would be returned safely within 12 hours of payment.
What made that first letter hard for investigators to wave off was its detail. The writer described a white Apple Watch belonging to Guthrie and the floodlights on the back porch of her house — the kind of specifics a person would know only from inside the property. Both messages were sent from untraceable email addresses, and investigators concluded they came from the same masked IP address, meaning a single author or a single group produced both.
The second note, sent four days later, dropped the money entirely. "She perished shortly after she was taken. We believe it was heart related. She is buried in nature now," it read. There was no renewed demand, no deadline, no instructions for a handoff — a shape that former federal investigators say does not match a kidnapping run for profit.
"I'm sure, and maybe even to this day, they're not 100% sure if these notes are legitimate," said Lance Leising, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, explaining why a department might hold such material for months before releasing it. Jason Pack, another retired FBI supervisory special agent, fixed on what the second writer did not do. The author "asked for nothing at all," Pack said, which argues against a straightforward financial motive and leaves investigators weighing far messier possibilities.
Nanos has defended both the delay and the release. "Those hostage notes: Are they valid, do we believe they're valid? We think every one of them's valid until we show otherwise," he said. His department put the letters out, it said, hoping someone would recognize the writing itself; investigators have asked the public to study what they described as distinctive patterns of word choice, syntax and phraseology, the verbal fingerprints a friend or coworker might place.
Guthrie remains missing. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to her whereabouts, and the Guthrie family has put up $1 million of its own. Savannah Guthrie has publicly urged whoever wrote the notes to come forward. Investigators say they believe the abduction was planned rather than opportunistic, and that no one has been ruled out.
Originally reported by CBS News.