David Bauder
New York: The back doors of Nancy Guthrie’s Arizona home were found propped open and her phone and purse were still at the home when the 84-year-old disappeared, daughter Savannah Guthrie said in an interview that aired on NBC’s Today, her first since her mother’s apparent abduction.
Given the tremendous pain their mother suffered from, Savannah Guthrie said she and her siblings knew it wasn’t a case of a person wandering off. Then there were the propped doors, blood on the front doorstep and a camera yanked off.
“So we were saying, ‘This is not OK’,” Guthrie said in the interview that aired on Thursday (US time). “’Something is very wrong here.’”
Her brother immediately realised that their mother had been kidnapped for ransom.
“I said, ‘What?’ And then, I mean, it sounds so, like, how dumb could I be? But I just, I didn’t want to believe.
“I just said, ‘Do you think because of me?’” Guthrie recounted, choking up and wiping away tears. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, sweetie, but, yeah, maybe.’”
Nancy Guthrie was reported missing on February 1. Authorities believe the 84-year-old was kidnapped, abducted or otherwise taken against her will. The FBI released surveillance videos of a masked man who was outside Guthrie’s front door in Tucson on the night she vanished. The Guthrie family has offered a reward of a $US1 million ($1.45 million) for information leading to the recovery of their mother.
“To think of what she went through. I wake up every night in the middle of the night,” Savannah Guthrie said.
“And in the darkness, I imagine her terror. And it is unthinkable, but those thoughts demand to be thought.”
The longtime Today show co-anchor said in the interview that they don’t know that their mother was taken because of her, but acknowledged that it would make sense.
“Which is too much to bear, to think that I brought this to her bedside, that it’s because of me. And I just say, ‘I’m so sorry, Mummy. I’m so sorry,’” Guthrie said. “If it is me, I’m so sorry.”
Some of the purported ransom notes were fake, Guthrie said, but she believed the two notes that she and her siblings responded to were real. But the circumstances were surreal.
“How is it possible that we are having to make a video speaking to a kidnapper who took an 84-year-old woman in the dead of night, in her pyjamas, with no shoes, without her medicine?” Guthrie asked.
Seeing the images of a man in a ski mask from the porch camera was terrifying, Guthrie said, but after “cruel speculation” that a family member might be involved began to swirl, she was “glad that people saw what came to our door”. She will never understand that speculation.
“No one took better care of my mom than my sister and brother-in-law. And no one protected my mom more than my brother,” Guthrie said.
Investigators have worked tirelessly, but the family needs answers, Guthrie said.
“We cannot be at peace without knowing and someone can do the right thing,” she said. “It is never too late to do the right thing and our hearts are focused on that.”
AP
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