A suspect in the abduction of US television host Savannah Guthrie’s elderly mother, Nancy, was taken into custody in Arizona on Tuesday, nine days after the 84-year-old woman was reported missing, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the case.
The Pima county sheriff’s department issued a separate statement online late on Tuesday saying deputies had “detained a subject during a traffic stop” and that the individual was “being questioned in connection to the Nancy Guthrie investigation”.
No further details were immediately available, and it was not clear whether the “suspect” taken into custody and the individual described as a “subject” detained in a traffic stop south of Tucson were the same person.
But the apparent breakthrough came hours after authorities released video and photos of an armed man in a ski mask tampering with the door camera of Nancy Guthrie’s home near Tucson on the morning that she was taken from her residence.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, published the images as the search for Nancy Guthrie, 84, stretched into its second week, saying the images had been “previously inaccessible” but were subsequently obtained from “residual data located in back-end systems”.
The black-and-white images depict a masked figure wearing gloves and a backpack approaching the door of Guthrie’s house. In one of the images, the person waves what appears to be a plant – and in the other, they begin to dismantle the Nest camera.
“Working with our partners, as of [Tuesday] morning, law enforcement has uncovered these previously inaccessible new images showing an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera at … Guthrie’s front door the morning of her disappearance,” Patel wrote on X.
Savannah Guthrie issued a desperate plea on Monday for anyone who might know anything about her missing mother to contact law enforcement. “We are at an hour of desperation,” she said. “And we need your help.”
The FBI has yet to identify a suspect, a day after the lapse of a deadline set by a ransom note from the octogenarian’s purported kidnappers.
The Guthrie family said on Sunday that they would pay kidnappers to ensure she safely returns home. Authorities have not confirmed the veracity of this ransom demand.
Efforts to contact the kidnappers appear to have fallen short, with officials saying on Monday night that they were “not aware of any continued communication between the Guthrie family and suspected kidnappers, nor have we identified a suspect or person of interest in this case at this time”.
The FBI said the agency was sending more agents from field offices across the US to Guthrie’s home city of Tucson, Arizona, outside of which her blood had been found.
“We are currently operating a 24-hour command post that includes crisis management experts, analytic support, and investigative teams. But we still need the public’s help,” NBC News quoted the FBI as saying. “Someone has that one piece of information that can help us bring Nancy home. We need that person to share what they know. Please call us at 1-800-CALL-FBI.”
Separately, the Guthrie family’s pastor, Michael Rudzena, described Nancy on television as a “strong woman” and “fiercely loving”.
“Prayer opens up possibilities in our own hearts,” he told Today. “Leaving a door open for hope is a way to fight against that fatality.”
Authorities believe Nancy Guthrie was taken from her home early on 1 February.
They had said that one roadblock in the ensuing search for Guthrie was the fact that somebody had disconnected her doorbell camera when she disappeared. And because she was not actively subscribed to the doorbell camera service provider, they could not immediately get images, they said.
With Reuters
