Nancy Guthrie’s home will be returned to family as search stretches into fourth week, sources say
Law enforcement officials are preparing to return Nancy Guthrie’s Arizona home to her family, sources said, as the search for her enters its fourth week.
Guthrie, 84, the mother of “TODAY” show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on Feb. 1.
For weeks, his Tucson-area home has been the center of a flurry of police activity, including the recovery of DNA evidence. The activity seen Wednesday is related to efforts to return the house to the Guthrie family, two federal law enforcement sources told NBC News.
Officials acknowledged that law enforcement no longer sees the need to seal off the premises as a crime scene or prevent the family from entering.
It was not immediately clear what the FBI or the Pima County Sheriff’s Department were doing inside the home Wednesday. It does not appear that they participated in activities outside the home that had been observed during previous visits, including testing or retracing their steps.
More than 23,000 calls have been made to the FBI tip line since Guthrie’s arrest, including 750 in the first 12 hours after Savannah Guthrie offered a $1 million reward Tuesday on Instagram, a senior official familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
Guthrie was last seen around 9:45 p.m. on Jan. 31 after dinner at her daughter Annie’s house, according to Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos. She was reported missing the next day when she failed to show up to attend a virtual church service with friends.
Authorities have not identified any suspects in his possible kidnapping.
On February 10, the FBI released photos taken by Guthrie’s Google Nest camera that showed a masked, armed man later described as a suspect outside his home the morning he disappeared. In this clip, the person appeared to be tampering with the camera.
Most of these images showed a masked person with a backpack. But one didn’t, showing the person dressed in dark clothing with a mask and gloves without a backpack.
On Monday, two law enforcement sources close to the investigation said the image without the backpack was taken earlier, not on the morning of her disappearance.
The FBI declined to comment on possible dates related to the image. The sheriff’s department said Monday that there was no date or timestamp associated with this image and that any suggestion that it was taken on a different day was “purely speculative.”
Nanos said officials believed the majority of those images were from Feb. 1 only because they showed the doorbell disconnected.
The Sheriff’s Department and FBI continue to actively pursue “all viable leads,” the department said Tuesday evening.
DNA evidence was collected from Guthrie’s home and associated search locations and subjected to forensic analysis, the sheriff’s department said. Tests carried out so far have yielded no results.
Nanos said mixed DNA was recovered from her home, meaning a DNA sample containing genetic information from at least two people, but there were problems with those samples.
