Nearly five months after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her home near Tucson, Arizona, three people familiar with the investigation have disclosed to NBC News what the second note sent to media outlets actually said: Nancy Guthrie was dead. The note offered no apology. It made no request for payment to recover her body.
The revelation, reported by NBC News on June 22, marks a grim turn in a case that has gripped the country since the mother of TODAY show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie was reported missing on February 1. The circumstances of her disappearance remain, by every official account, a mystery, no suspect identified by name, no arrest, no body recovered.
And the family is still waiting.
What investigators now know is that two separate notes were sent to media outlets, including KOLD, a local Tucson television station. The first note told recipients that Nancy Guthrie was "safe" and demanded cryptocurrency in exchange for her release. It was, in the grim vocabulary of kidnapping cases, a ransom demand.
The second note told a different story entirely. It indicated she had died. It asked for nothing. Jessica Bobula, KOLD's news director, told NBC News in earlier reporting that the second note differed "in almost every way" from the first.
That contrast raises hard questions. Was the first note a bluff? Did something go wrong between the two communications? Or is someone playing a cruel game with a family in agony? Investigators who examined both notes believe they are "potentially credible," NBC News reported, a careful phrase that stops short of confirmation but signals the FBI is not dismissing them.
The case has drawn sustained investigative attention from the FBI, which established a 24-hour command post and offered a $50,000 reward for information. DNA tests confirmed that blood found on Nancy Guthrie's front porch matched hers, as the Associated Press reported. Her doorbell camera was disconnected in the early hours of the morning she disappeared.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen at approximately 9:45 p.m. the night before she was reported missing. She failed to show up for church the next day, and her family raised the alarm on February 1.
Ten days later, the FBI recovered doorbell camera images from her home. On February 12, FBI Phoenix posted those images to X, showing an armed, masked man of average build, roughly five feet nine to five feet ten, carrying a black Ozark Trail Hiker Pack, a 25-liter backpack. The bureau described the figure as a suspect.
That description remains the closest thing to a public lead. No name. No face. A Pima County sheriff's warning about a kidnapping suspect near Guthrie's home underscored the threat, but months have passed without a visible break in the case.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said earlier in the investigation that authorities believed Nancy Guthrie was "still out there," though he acknowledged they had no proof she was alive. "We want her home," Nanos told Newsmax.
Savannah Guthrie has made repeated public appeals since her mother's disappearance. After the second note was sent, she posted a 20-second Instagram video alongside her siblings, Camron and Annie. The three sat together, hands clasped. Savannah Guthrie spoke directly to whoever had taken their mother:
"We received your message and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay."
The brevity was striking. Twenty seconds. No details about the message she referenced, no specifics about what the family understood. Whether that restraint reflected law enforcement guidance or the family's own judgment is unknown.
On February 15, Savannah Guthrie posted a second video to Instagram, this time addressing anyone who might have information about her mother's whereabouts. Her message was simple: "It is never too late to do the right thing."
In an earlier video, she had been more direct about the family's situation. "She was taken and we don't know where, and we need your help," she said.
The two notes sent to KOLD and other outlets were not the only communications to surface. In April, TMZ founder Harvey Levin revealed that his outlet had received two additional purported ransom notes from the same anonymous individual who had previously demanded one bitcoin for information. Those newer notes contained flatly contradictory claims, one stated "She is dead," while the other claimed the sender had seen Nancy Guthrie alive in Sonora, Mexico. The sender demanded half a bitcoin upfront and another half upon a public arrest, the New York Post reported.
Levin, who examined the earlier ransom note in detail, described it as sophisticated. "This is not a letter that was thrown together in a couple of minutes," he said. "It is a very specific, well-organized, layered letter that really lays things out. This is not AI." That earlier note began by stating Nancy Guthrie "is safe, but scared" and contained specific details about the interior of her home, Breitbart reported. The bitcoin address it included was confirmed as real.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department said all tips and leads were "being taken seriously and are forwarded directly to our detectives, who are coordinating with the FBI."
The FBI deployed digital billboards in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico seeking public tips. The bureau's tip line, 1-800-CALL-FBI, remains active.
One of the unsettling threads running through this case is the question of response time. FBI Director Kash Patel said publicly that the bureau was sidelined for four days after Nancy Guthrie's disappearance, a gap that, in a kidnapping case involving an elderly victim and a ransom demand, could matter enormously. Every hour counts when someone is taken against their will. Four days is an eternity.
Whether that delay affected the trajectory of the investigation is impossible to say from the outside. But it is the kind of institutional failure that demands answers, especially when the victim is an 84-year-old woman taken from her own home in the middle of the night.
Meanwhile, the search has extended beyond Arizona. A planned search in Nogales, Mexico, was postponed, adding another layer of frustration to a case already defined by dead ends and contradictory signals.
The list of unanswered questions is long. Has the sender of the notes been identified? Has Nancy Guthrie's body been found? What, specifically, did the second note say about the circumstances of her death, cause, manner, location, timing? Is the masked figure on the doorbell camera the same person who sent the notes? What cryptocurrency amount was demanded in the first note, and was any payment ever made?
None of these questions have public answers as of late June 2026. The FBI has not announced any arrests. The case file, whatever it contains, remains sealed behind an active investigation.
FBI spokesperson Connor Hagan offered what amounts to a standing appeal: "Someone has that one piece of information that can help us bring Nancy home."
Five months in, an 84-year-old woman is still missing. The people who are supposed to find her have a suspect's silhouette, a pair of contradictory notes, and a family holding on to hope that grows thinner by the week. Somewhere, someone knows what happened to Nancy Guthrie. The question is whether the institutions charged with solving this case can compel that person to talk, or whether an elderly woman's fate will simply fade from the headlines, one more unsolved file in a system that too often lets victims down.
