On Feb. 16, 2026, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos issued a statement that recast weeks of public speculation: Nancy Guthrie’s family—including her three children and their spouses—had been cleared as possible suspects in her disappearance. The announcement came after investigators briefed relatives privately and completed a review of forensic and digital evidence gathered since the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie vanished from her Catalina Foothills home near Tucson.
Nancy was last seen on the evening of Jan. 31 after dinner and games at the home of her older daughter, Annie Guthrie, and Annie’s husband, Tommaso Cioni. Cioni dropped Nancy off about 9:48 p.m.; the garage door closed two minutes later. In the early hours of Feb. 1 her doorbell camera disconnected, movement was logged at the door, and her pacemaker app lost contact with her phone. Relatives found the house empty around midday after she missed a planned church livestream. Blood on the front porch was later confirmed to be hers. Sheriff Nanos said from the start that she had not left willingly.
Annie, the last family member to see her mother that night, became a focus of online rumor even as authorities searched her Tucson home more than once. Nanos repeatedly said Annie and Cioni were not suspects. The Feb. 16 statement made that official for the whole family: they had been “nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case.” The update did not close the investigation. It removed one line of public conjecture so detectives could concentrate on the masked figure captured on doorbell video.
That video, released Feb. 10, showed a person in a ski mask and gloves, carrying a backpack and what appeared to be a holstered handgun, tampering with the camera before Nancy disappeared. The FBI later described the suspect as a man about 5-foot-9 with an average build, wearing a 25-liter Ozark Trail pack. A glove recovered about two miles from the house was sent for DNA comparison with items from the scene. Multiple ransom notes demanding cryptocurrency reached news outlets; investigators treated at least one as potentially genuine and dismissed others as hoaxes. Deadlines passed without a confirmed recovery.
Savannah Guthrie and her siblings, including Annie and brother Camron, had already issued video pleas asking whoever took their mother to prove she was alive and to let her come home. They asked again for privacy after the Feb. 16 briefing. Nancy, who lived alone, needed daily medication and had limited mobility. Those facts kept the search urgent even as the case shifted from a missing-person scramble into a slower criminal inquiry involving the sheriff’s office and the FBI.
Authorities asked the public not to treat unverified social-media claims as fact. Tips after the suspect video numbered in the thousands; a man detained for questioning was released. Neighbors were asked for camera footage from a two-mile radius in the weeks before Feb. 1. No arrest had been announced. The central questions remained the same: who took Nancy Guthrie, and where she was.
The Feb. 16 clarification did not answer those questions. It did state plainly that the family was not the answer investigators were pursuing. The search for the masked individual, the DNA on the glove, and any credible ransom trail continued. For the Guthries, another official update arrived as both relief and another reminder that their mother was still missing.
