The sheriff who has been heading the search for Nancy Guthrie has said that claims her disappearance was related to a burglary gone wrong are false. This comes after it has been over two weeks since the 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie was reported missing.
“This is somebody who disappeared from the face of the Earth, and now we have a camera that says here’s the person who did this,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told the Daily Mail. Those investigating the case have made little progress since the elderly woman was apparently abducted from her home. There have been tens of thousands of tips in the case, but police have yet to publicly identify a suspect after the publishing of a video of the alleged kidnapper was seen in a ski mask on Guthrie‘s doorstep.
Nanos believes that the crime was indeed a kidnapping. This comes after an unidentified source told AZFamily that the disappearance of Guthrie could have been linked to a burglary gone wrong. Nanos pointed to the unclear motivation and said that nothing of significant value was taken from the home. “That’s what makes me say this is a kidnapping. The motivation for it is where we get stuck, right?” Nanos added. “Is it for money? I mean, we had the one demand where they asked for money. But is it really for money, or is it for revenge for something?”
The sheriff said that the theory about Guthrie’s disappearance being a botched burglary did not come from the police. Guthrie was last seen on January 31 and the search to find her has entered its third week. Authorities are hoping for a lead in the case from a glove that was found two miles from Guthrie’s home. “The one with the DNA profile recovered is different and appears to match the gloves of the subject in the surveillance video,” the FBI said.
Nanos added, “I believe somebody out there can look at that video and go, ‘I know exactly who that is.'” There have been around 16 gloves found in the area over the past couple of weeks around the area of Guthrie’s Arizona home.
The FBI has increased the reward for information that will lead to the capture of Guthrie’s kidnapper to $100,000.