Police in Arizona are quietly preparing for the possibility that missing 84-year-old grandmother Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was murdered, as US prosecutors say her disappearance near Tucson on 1 February could be the basis of a full 'no-body' homicide case.
The searching failed to find any trace of Nancy, who vanished from her home outside Tucson earlier this year. The case, which began as a standard missing person report, has steadily shifted into darker territory as time has passed without sightings, clear leads or confirmed evidence that she left of her own accord. For a public more used to seeing Savannah reporting the news than living it, the slow drip of developments has been both unsettling and strangely distant, anchored in legal terms and law-enforcement procedure.
