Armed Masked Man Caught on Camera in Abduction of 84-Year-Old Arizona Woman

Surveillance footage released by the FBI showed an armed, masked man approaching the Catalina Foothills home of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie at 2:12 a.m. on February 1, 2026. Recovering that footage required days of painstaking work; FBI Director Kash Patel said investigators spent considerable time retrieving lost, corrupted, or inaccessible images before it could be released, roughly ten days after Guthrie was reported missing.

Guthrie, the mother of TODAY show anchor Savannah Guthrie, had dinner that evening at the Tucson home of her daughter Annie and son-in-law Tommaso Cioni, leaving around 9:45 p.m. Her family called the Pima County Sheriff's Office around noon on February 1 after she failed to appear for virtual church services at a friend's house. The digital trail reconstructed by investigators tells a precise and alarming story: her doorbell camera was disabled at 1:47 a.m., the masked figure appeared on footage 25 minutes later, and at 2:28 a.m., her pacemaker, synced to a Bluetooth monitoring app on her phone, lost its signal. Bloodstains at the scene were confirmed through DNA testing to be hers. Gloves recovered at the residence were sent for forensic testing. She left without the medications she needed.

The FBI described the suspect as a male between 5 feet 9 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a medium build, carrying a 24-liter black Ozark Trail Hiker Pack. No arrests have been made.

Ransom demands arrived not at law enforcement offices but at local media outlets and TMZ. KOLD-TV, a CBS affiliate in Tucson, reported receiving a letter demanding cryptocurrency for Nancy's release as early as February 2. Two deadlines in those notes had passed by February 9. Savannah Guthrie told Hoda Kotb she believed two of the notes were legitimate and that she and her siblings offered to pay. A California man, Derrick Callella, 42, was separately accused of sending a fraudulent ransom note and made his initial appearance in federal court in Tucson.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos publicly stated he believed Nancy had been abducted, but his handling of the case has since prompted a recall effort against him. The investigation drew the FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and search-and-rescue teams alongside thousands of officers and volunteers who searched the surrounding desert terrain of cacti, brush, and boulders. After the FBI released surveillance images, more than 4,000 calls flooded the Sheriff's tip line within 24 hours. On February 10, a person of interest was detained during a traffic stop in Rio Rico, about 60 miles south of Tucson, then released without charges the following day.

The reward pool grew as weeks passed without a break in the case. The Guthrie family announced a $1 million reward on February 24. The FBI raised its own reward from $50,000 to $200,000 in stages, and a private donor contributed a separate $100,000. President Donald Trump called Savannah on February 4 to offer federal resources following an NBC interview with Tom Llamas, and the White House posted about the case on social media urging the public to come forward.

Savannah, who has co-anchored TODAY since 2012, stepped away from the desk in early February. In a three-part interview with Hoda Kotb airing March 26 and 27, she described the weight of suspecting her own prominence had made her mother a target: "which is too much to bear, to think that I brought this to her bedside, that it's because of me." She also vowed: "I will not let whoever did this take my children's mother from them."

She returned to Studio 1A on April 6, wearing a yellow dress that echoed the yellow ribbons and flowers left at her mother's Arizona home. "Here we go, ready or not — let's do the news," she said. Nancy Guthrie has not been found.