Nancy Guthrie’s Daughter Was Sent WHAT About Mexico?!

Tony Brueski (0:00)

On September 28th, a text message landed claiming Nancy Guthrie is alive and being held in Mexico. The sender wanted Bitcoin. Within 24 hours, the Pima County Sheriff's Department called it not credible. A retired FBI agent who analyzed the message publicly says it matches a scam she was personally targeted by back in April. Same playbook, same con, different mark.

This is what passes for a lead in the Nancy Guthrie case. A recycled Bitcoin scam that somebody dusted off and aimed at a family whose mother was stolen from her bed eight months ago.

Fake ransom demands keep making national headlines in this case. Derek Colella, a 42-year-old California man with a meth addiction and zero connection to the kidnapping, texted Nancy's daughter four days after she vanished. He'd seen the news, found the family's contact information online, and used a phone app to create a fake number. Did you get the Bitcoin? He wrote. He got five years probation. The case has become an open invitation for grifters. Anyone with a burner app and a news alert can hijack the worst moment of this family's life for a shot at a payday. And every fake note steals the headline from the only question that matters.

Eight months after Nancy Guthrie was taken from her bed, is anyone closer to finding out who did it? The answer, based on what's publicly known, isn't what anyone wants to hear.

Nancy Guthrie is 84 years old. She's the mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie. On the evening of January 31st, her daughter Annie and son-in-law Tommaso Cioni dropped her off at her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson after dinner. That was the last time anyone in her family saw her.

Nancy lives alone. She's physically fragile. Her family has described her mobility limitations, her daily pain, and her reliance on medication she can't survive long without. But she's sharp, no cognitive issues, never misses her Sunday church livestream.

Sometime in the early morning hours of February 1st, someone came for her. Her blood was found on the front porch. Her phone sat on the nightstand. Her doorbell camera went dark at 1:47 a.m. Her pacemaker stopped syncing with her phone 41 minutes later, at 2:28 a.m. That 41-minute window tells you something. Whatever happened to Nancy was violent enough to leave blood on concrete and fast enough to separate her from her heart monitor before it pinged again. A churchgoer called the family the next morning when Nancy didn't log on to her Sunday live stream. Eight months later, no arrest, no name suspect, no body. A combined reward of more than $1.2 million, and no one's claimed it. Here's what this investigation actually has. And I need to be honest, this is everything. The FBI recovered footage from Google servers showing a masked individual at Nancy's front door before she disappeared. Armed, wearing gloves, carrying a backpack. That person tampered with the doorbell camera. And then, Nancy was gone. It's the only image of the alleged kidnapper. And the mask makes identification almost impossible without a name to match it to. The public calls him Porch Guy.

That's where this investigation is. Eight months in. The prime suspect has a reddit nickname and no face.

A former FBI official dismissed Porch Guy as low-level muscle and suggest of the people who organize this aren't on camera. No enhanced photo has been made public.

Investigators found DNA at the scene that doesn't belong to Nancy or anyone close to her. The sample was collected in February. Genetic genealogy testing, the same technique that identified the Golden State killer, which matches unknown DNA to distant relatives through public databases and narrows down to a suspect, began in March. But sources close to the investigation described that DNA as low-level. That means the sample may not produce a usable genetic profile. Seven months of lab work on evidence that might lead nowhere. The gloves found two miles from the house, the ones the FBI initially said appeared to match those in the surveillance footage were traced through DNA to a local restaurant worker. He has nothing to do with this case. That lead is dead.

Then the ransom notes. Two that the FBI calls potentially legitimate. The first arrived February 2nd, sent to a Tucson television station and to Savannah Guthrie. We have your mother Nancy. She is safe but scared. It demanded 4 million dollars in Bitcoin and described the placement of Nancy's Apple Watch with a white wristband on the floor near her bed, along with a damaged floodlight in her backyard. Investigators took it seriously because those details, they said, could only have come from someone who had been inside the home. The second note arrived 4 days later. It said, Nancy was dead. We did not fully grasp the seriousness of her physical condition, it read. She perished shortly after she was taken. There was an apology. Nothing you could have done could have changed the outcome. The note claimed, she is buried in nature now. Whoever wrote those notes, if they are real, kidnapped an 84 year old woman, demanded 4 million dollars, and then sent her family a condolence letter 4 days later. In late July, authorities released both notes publicly, asking anyone who recognizes the writing style to come forward. Tips increased slightly, according to the Sheriff's Department. None cracked the case.