STRANGE COINCIDENCE: Nancy Guthrie, who’s still missing, reportedly played along in staged 'kidnapping' tradition during daughter’s chilhood
In her 2024 memoir "Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere," NBC "Today" show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie recounted a lighthearted childhood tradition involving staged "kidnappings" orchestrated by her cousin Teri during annual summer visits to the family's Tucson, Arizona, home.
As detailed in the book, Teri would wake young Savannah and her sister Annie before dawn, quietly usher them into a rickety station wagon, and drive north to Phoenix, stopping at a pay phone midway to call their mother, Nancy Guthrie. Nancy, then in her role as a playful parent, would feign shock and dismay, protesting how much she would miss them before assuring the girls she would drive up in a few days to "retrieve" them. According to the book, this ritual was meant to be innocent family fun with no malicious intent, and Savannah describes it fondly as part of her upbringing in a close-knit household.
This odd childhood story has resurfaced amid the tragic real-life abduction of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie from her Catalina Foothills home in Tucson on February 1, with authorities emphasizing no connection between the childhood game and the current crime.
Nancy was last seen by family on the evening of January 31 after dinner at her daughter Annie's house, but doorbell camera footage captured a masked intruder armed with a gun tampering with the device around 3 a.m., followed by signs of a struggle inside the residence, including blood evidence. Reported missing when she failed to attend a virtual church service with a friend, the case prompted an immediate response from the Pima County Sheriff's Office and FBI, who have cleared family members—including Savannah, Annie, and their spouses—as suspects. Sheriff Chris Nanos has vowed not to abandon the search, describing it as a suspected kidnapping, while investigators noted no evidence of Nancy being taken across the U.S.-Mexico border despite initial inquiries with Mexican authorities.
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Recent developments highlight the case's complexity: DNA from the scene and a discarded glove yielded no matches in the FBI's CODIS database, prompting the use of investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) to trace potential relatives through commercial databases like Ancestry or 23andMe.
Online searches for Nancy's address spiked unusually in the weeks prior, raising suspicions of premeditation, while a local man, Luke Daley, was briefly detained and questioned but released without charges after cooperating. Searches extended to nearby properties, including a raid on a house two miles away, but no breakthroughs have emerged as the probe enters its third week, underscoring challenges in elder abduction cases where motives could range from ransom to personal grudges.