Savannah Guthrie may never know what happened to her loved one. In the US, she’s not alone | Arizona

Savannah Guthrie is moving back to New York to resume anchoring NBC’s Today show and acknowledging that her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, may not be found a month after she disappeared from her Tucson, Arizona, home in the middle of the night.

“We still believe in a miracle,” Guthrie said in a video last week announcing a $1m reward for her mother’s return in an enduring mystery that has gripped the US for four weeks. “We also know that she may be lost. She may already be gone.”

Soon after, the FBI said it was relocating its command focused on the missing grandmother from Tucson to Phoenix and her home was being released back to the Guthrie family. DNA samples recovered from the home have only produced hits of people who had reason to be there, and analysis of gloves found in the vicinity have not produced any leads.

The increased reward, says former FBI profiler Bryanna Fox, is a strategic move in missing persons cases when the collection of physical evidence from a crime scene cannot be taken further, or the chain of evidence has been broken in terms of what could be plausibly introduced in court.

“They’re hoping that where one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars was not enough, one million could be enough to convince someone who is in this to come forward,” said Fox, now a criminologist at the University of South Florida.

The theory behind that also relies on the idea that while a crime may initially have been committed by one person, more people become involved or aware of it later. “Somebody talks, somebody is acting unusual and someone notices,” she said. “In almost every crime, there’s more than one person that knows or has a good idea what happened.”

In her message, Guthrie said: “If you’ve been waiting and you haven’t been sure, let this be your sign to please come forward.”

Survivors of comparable situations have begun speaking out. Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted from her home in 2002 at age 14 and rescued nine months later, told the “LadyGang” podcast she knew what law enforcement would say.

“If a person disappears and they’re not found within the first 24 to 48 hours, the chances of their survival drop down to almost 0%,” Smart said. “It’s almost like they’re dead. But I just always feel like we, we can’t give up, because if that was the mentality around my case, then I wouldn’t be here today.”

As the active law enforcement search for Nancy Guthrie appears to wind down, volunteer groups have stepped in, including the Searching Mothers of Sonora and the Cajun Navy, who typically respond to natural disasters, who say authorities aren’t doing enough to find the missing 84-year-old.

But alongside the increased reward for information, Guthrie pledged a $500,000 donation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a group that caters to the families affected when children go missing. The gift was seen as an acknowledgement by the Guthries, by virtue of their means and public profile, that their case is an exception to the experience of most families faced with disappeared loved ones.

Michelle DeLaune, CEO of the center, said in a statement that the support would “provide guidance, resources and hope to families experiencing similar grief and searching for answers”. The donation, she added, “is rooted in a simple but powerful belief: when a family is in crisis, they deserve someone to stand with them”.

According to Fox, research conducted by former student Michelle Jeanis, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, showed that media attention made the successful resolution of missing persons cases more likely.

“If there’s media attention, the odds of someone being found alive doubles,” she says. “NCMEC can help with that, putting out press releases, compiling family photos. That can help get the media attention on cases that otherwise seem forgotten.”

More than 500,000 people were reported missing in the US last year, according to the justice department, the vast majority reported as kidnappings owing to custody or visitation disputes that are quickly resolved. The Guthrie case is in some ways exceptional – the abduction of an older woman is rare.

The Guthries’ gift also appeared to acknowledge the so-called “missing white woman syndrome”, a phrase coined by the late journalist Gwen Ifill to describe the attention given to missing white women compared with people from minority groups.

Nowhere are those disparities of attention more in evidence than on Native American land, where the number of cases of missing women and the disproportionate incidents of violence against them, has produced its own movement, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).

On average, more than 5,000 Native American and Alaska Native women and girls are reported missing each year, according to US Department of Justice data cited by Indian Affairs.

A little more than 100 miles (160km) from Nancy Guthrie’s Tucson home, and almost exactly a year earlier, 14-year-old Emily Pike, a San Carlos Apache girl, went missing from her group home in Mesa, Arizona. Pike’s body was later found dismembered. Pike’s mother only found out when photos of the crime scene appeared in the media.

As of now, no suspects have been identified, despite a $150,000 reward offered for information.

Arizona governor Katie Hobbs signed a new law that would create a “turquoise alert”, a new kind of alert that can be issued by the department of public safety when a Native person goes missing that goes out to all law enforcement agencies.

Activist and musician Waŋbdí Wašté, a member of the Yankton Sioux of North Dakota, said that when a case like the Guthrie abduction makes the headlines, “it’s normally a non-Native people. It’s insane how many people are going missing on tribal land.”

A relative of Wašté, Candace LeClaire, has recently gone missing in Arizona. But beyond a post on Facebook, it has not been reported in the media. LeClaire, 51, is described as having a large tattoo on her left upper arm with a last known sighting in Mesa.

“From where I come from, it doesn’t make me angry, but they should be putting everybody out there. It’s such a complex system of how Indigenous Native people go missing. There’s a difference there, but there’s always been a difference. And it’s always been happening,” Wašté said.